zeppelin

This is a follow-up to last week's "Before you buy a sound bar speaker, read this" post, but this time I'm setting my sights on expensive, $400-plus iPod and Bluetooth speaker "docks." They have built-in limitations common to all single-speaker systems. They might have two sets of speaker drivers housed in a single cabinet, but when the drivers are just a few inches apart, "stereo" sounds more or less like mono. In the quest to make these speakers as sleek and lightweight as possible, bass and dynamic range capabilities are limited, compared … Read more

This might be a tough question for a lot of people: defining what good sound is, and separating sound from music isn't easy. It might be impossible to distill it to just one album or song. We tend to like the sound of music we like, and conflate good sound with good music. That's understandable, but when the sound jumps out and draws your attention, take, for example, the sound of Jimi Hendrix's feedback. It was Hendrix's distortion, not his songs, that forever changed the sound of electric guitars.

Paul McCartney said it was the sound … Read more

OAKLAND -- Last week marked the 75th anniversary of the Hindenburg disaster, and the end of the golden era of zeppelin passenger travel.

But anyone who lives in or around the San Francisco Bay Area is no doubt aware that these days, zeppelin travel is alive and well. That's thanks to Airship Ventures, a company run out of the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., which operates one of the world's three airships, all of which were build by Zeppelin NT, a company located in Friedrichshafen, Germany.

Today, during an event hosted by the cloud storage … Read more

In Tom Clancy's sensationalist novel "Debt of Honor," a disgruntled pilot decides to avenge his lost honor by crashing a fuel-laden 747 directly into the U.S. Capitol, causing the giant building to explode and collapse. The scope of that fictional disaster was hard to fathom prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

But even before 9/11, anyone who had been in Lakehurst, N.J., on May 6, 1937, would have had a pretty good sense of just how big an explosion Clancy had in mind. Because that day, the Hindenburg, a German zeppelin … Read more

If you've driven through Mountain View, Calif., on Highway 101 recently, you've no doubt seen one of the most famous buildings in Silicon Valley going through some hard times.

The building is Hangar One at the NASA Ames Research Center, a giant structure that once housed America's great zeppelins, but which today is going through a long and expensive decontamination process.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, Hangar One needs about $33 million worth of work done to strip it of PCB-laden paneling. Now a private company controlled by Google's founders--H211--has apparently offered 100 percent of the funding necessary … Read more

FRIEDRICHSHAFEN, Germany--The thunder and lightning outside are fierce, so there are no flights today. That's disappointing for anyone who had been scheduled to fly, but for me it's a blessing: I get to see Europe's only Zeppelin NT in its home hangar.

As part of Road Trip 2011 I'd come to this Germany city on Lake Constance to visit the Zeppelin Museum, but as a bonus, I was now headed out for a meeting with Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik (ZLT), the only company in the world that makes the internal-structure airships. And with buckets of water coming down … Read more

It seems more than a little strange to me, but iPod speakers are really popular. This much I do understand, people love their iPods, and if they don't have a hi-fi system an iPod speaker might look like the best way to go. At $599 (MSRP) Monitor Audio's i-Deck 200 is priced at the upper end of the market, and competes with the Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin Air ($599), Bose SoundDock 10 ($599) and the Monster Beats by Dr. Dre Beatbox iPod Dock ($449), but are any of these worth the money?

For most buyers of high-end iPod … Read more

FRIEDRICHSHAFEN, Germany--It's one of the most famous photographs ever--the Hindenburg exploding on its mast, lives instantly lost, the romance of a modern way of travel forever tainted.

That is probably true nowhere more than this modest city on the northern shore of Lake Constance, a place where zeppelins were invented and the Hindenburg called home.

Of course, that disaster took place in 1937, but here in Friedrichshafen, the memory of that famous airship, and its many German cousins, lives on every day at the Zeppelin Museum, an homage to an age long before jumbo jets, when flying across the Atlantic meant three days, but three luxurious days for sure.

The Zeppelin Museum is part history lesson, part cheerleader. Visitors--about 250,000 a year these days--are treated both to an education in the origins of the zeppelin as an aircraft, and to a bit of a love affair with the Hindenburg and its famous predecessor, the Graf Zeppelin.… Read more

B&W, which is now branding itself by its longer, more formal name, Bowers & Wilkins, is known for its high-end speakers. However, a few years back the company dipped into the more mainstream consumer market with its first iPod speaker system, the $600 Zeppelin, followed by the smaller and more affordable Zeppelin Mini.

Now the company is back with a new version of the Zeppelin called the Zeppelin Air that shares many design traits with the original Zep but offers better sound and one very important new feature: support for Apple's AirPlay. That feature allows you to … Read more