The sound coming from a TV’s built-in speakers typically sucks: It’s invariably thin and weak, and the dialog is nearly unintelligible. Of course, you could assemble a complete outboard sound system with an A/V receiver and speakers, but that is often more trouble—and more expensive—than it’s worth, especially for a secondary TV in the bedroom or other outlying area of your home.

The best solution for this conundrum is a soundbar, a wide, thin enclosure that includes several speaker drivers and sits just below the TV screen. Most soundbars do not deliver the sound quality of a full-blown audio system, but they far exceed the capabilities of most TVs’ built-in speakers. And many can even simulate the effect of a complete surround-sound system using psychoacoustic trickery.

The $700 Harman Kardon Enchant 800 is just such a soundbar. Does it fulfill the promise of better sound without the hassle or expense of a more extensive outboard audio system? I was eager to find out.

Harman Kardon

Features

Like most soundbars, the Enchant 800 is wide and slender, measuring 33.8- by 2.6- by 4.9 inches (W x H x D) and weighing in at 9.5 pounds. It will fit neatly below the screen of most stand-mounted TVs, but it needs almost five inches of of depth. If your TV is wall-mounted, the soundbar can be mounted below it with the included hardware.

The Enchant 800 provides eight channels of audio with six 2-inch woofers, two 1-inch tweeters, and a proprietary technology called MultiBeam. Using sophisticated digital signal processing (DSP) and side-firing drivers that direct some sounds to reflect from the walls, the Enchant 800 is intended to create a 5.1 surround-sound field from Dolby Digital and DTS bitstreams. A feature called Acoustic MultiBeam Calibration (AMC) optimizes the system for your room without requiring a separate calibration microphone.

Built-in audio amplification provides a combined maximum peak of 180 watts, with an RMS power rating of 90W. Total harmonic distortion (THD) is 1% with a maximum output of 91dB SPL. The frequency response is specified from 76Hz to 20kHz, and a port on the back of the unit enhances the bass performance. If you want even deeper bass, an optional Enchant wireless subwoofer is available for an additional $699.95.

One HDMI 2.0 input that supports HDCP 2.2 copy protection lets you connect an HDMI source device to the Enchant 800. The audio portion of the signal is reproduced by the soundbar, while the video is sent to the TV from the unit’s HDMI output. That output supports ARC (Audio Return Channel), which lets the TV send audio from its internal streaming apps or over-the-air tuner back to the soundbar along the same cable. The HDMI input and output offer bandwidth of 18Gbps to support 4K/UHD content and HDR10 video.

Harman Kardon

Other connections include a 3.5mm analog-audio input, an optical digital-audio input, and a USB 2.0 port. In addition, the Enchant 800 offers two wireless options: You can send audio from a mobile device via Bluetooth 4.2 (A2DP v1.2 and AVRCP v 1.5 profiles are supported), and you can stream audio from online services on your mobile device via Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n/ac), thanks to Google Chromecast being built in.

The Enchant 800 offers five preset sound modes—Standard, Music, Movie, Voice, and Personal—which adjust the EQ and amount of MultiBeam effect for different types of content. The Voice mode enhances dialog, while the Personal mode starts out identical to Standard mode, but can be customized with different levels of bass and stored in five independent memories. The other sound modes can be modified, but they cannot be stored.

Two additional features are Night Mode and Audio Sync. Night Mode reduces the dynamic range of the audio, so you can hear everything when the volume is low. That way, you won’t disturb others who are trying to sleep or otherwise require quiet. Audio Sync lets you adjust the audio delay if it is not synchronized with the video. This is especially important to ensure dialog is synchronized with the lips of anyone who is speaking onscreen. The Night Mode setting is stored in the user presets, but Audio Sync is a global setting that applies to all sound modes.

Harman Kardon

Harman Kardon

The Enchant 800 automatically responds to the IR commands for volume and mute for most TVs from LG, Samsung, Sony, and Vizio, which makes integrating the soundbar with any of these TVs much easier. You can also disable this feature if you prefer. If you have a TV from another manufacturer, you can teach the soundbar its IR remote commands. Even better, if the TV supports HDMI CEC (Consumer Electronics Control), many TV remotes will automatically work that way.

Setup

I decided to use the Enchant 800 with the TV in the master bedroom, a Sony KDL-40V5100 LCD TV. It fits nicely on the rotating platform the TV sits on and does not obscure the TV or its infrared receiver for remote commands. (Some soundbars are tall enough to block the IR receiver.)

Unfortunately, the TV is located with an open closet to the right and an open hallway to the left, making reflections impossible from those areas. I don’t have a better place to test the soundbar, so I initiated the soundbar’s calibration routine and let the chips—er, sounds—fall where they may.

After calibration, I started with an optical digital-audio connection from the TV to the Enchant 800. My Dish satellite box and Oppo BDP-103 Blu-ray player were connected to the TV’s HDMI inputs. I set the TV to use an external audio system rather than its own speakers, and the soundbar responded to the TV remote’s volume and mute commands as expected.

Harman Kardon

The TV’s optical output, however, only sends 2-channel audio, so I switched to an HDMI cable from the satellite box or Blu-ray player to the Enchant 800 and another HDMI cable from the soundbar to the TV. (The Enchant 800 has only one HDMI input, so I had to swap cables depending on whether I wanted to watch the satellite box or Blu-ray player.) In that configuration, the soundbar no longer responded to the TV remote’s volume and mute commands. Also, I tend to keep the satellite box on, even when the TV is off, in which case the audio is still audible unless I mute the soundbar or put it in standby mode.

These issues can be addressed by programming the TV, satellite, or universal remote with the volume and mute commands for the soundbar and creating a macro to put the soundbar in standby mode when the TV is turned off. I didn’t do that, but it is certainly possible.

Also, when I fired up the satellite receiver and TV, the soundbar awakened from standby mode and selected the ARC input, not the HDMI input. (When I had both the optical and HDMI connections between the TV and soundbar, the soundbar awakened with the optical input selected, so I disconnected the optical cable.) The input is selected by repeatedly pressing the Source button to cycle through the inputs, so this can’t be easily incorporated into a universal-remote macro. I wish you could set the soundbar to awaken with the last active input selected.

Harman Kardon

Performance

I started my performance evaluation with some audio tests on the THX Calibration Disc; specifically, the channel-identification tests, which play pink noise in each channel sequentially. I played the 5.1 tests in Dolby Digital, DTS, and PCM. In each case, the surround channels did not extend beyond the boundaries of the enclosure.

Moving on to real content, I watched some of the Pixar film Inside Out on Blu-ray. After trying the different sound modes, I liked Movie mode the best; it sounded the most robust. In Voice mode, the dialog was front and center, but there wasn’t much bass at all. I could increase the bass level, but I couldn’t save that as a user preset. During the scene when Joy and Sadness accidentally fly through channels in Riley’s mind and end up in long-term memory, I listened for surround effects beyond the boundaries of the soundbar, but I couldn’t hear any.

Next up was Gravity on Blu-ray, which has lots of surround content. This time, I heard a bit of sound extending beyond the enclosure during the initial encounter with the debris field near the beginning of the movie. The dialog was good, with excellent localization of voices across the front soundstage.

Another Blu-ray I checked out was Certifiable, a live concert video of The Police performing in Buenos Aires. As expected, Voice mode was quite wimpy with very little bass. The bass was much better in Music mode—in fact, perhaps a bit too much—but the vocals were somewhat muffled. Movie mode sounded the best to me, with good vocals and slightly emphasized bass. That mode sounded more lively and present than Standard mode.

Harman Kardon

As The Police performed “Synchronicity II,” I played with the Audio Sync control and found that it had much less effect than I expected. I ran it up to its maximum value of 250ms, but the audio/video sync was nowhere near a quarter-second off. This is especially easy to see and hear when watching a drummer on the screen. Still, I settled on 40ms, which brought Stewart Copeland’s drum hits into near-perfect sync.

I also watched a bit of The Chronicles of Riddick on the Encore channel as provided by Dish Network. In Movie mode, dialog intelligibility was very good, and I could hear a few surround effects beyond the confines of the soundbar. The bass was okay, but nothing spectacular.

Finally, I paired my iPhone 6 with the Enchant 800 via Bluetooth and listened to “Funky ‘T’” on Steve Turre’s album Rhythm Within. This Latin-jazz track includes Turre on trombone and sea-shell trumpets along with full horn and rhythm sections. Movie and Standard modes sounded too tubby, while Voice mode was too thin and anemic. In this case, Music mode was the cleanest, with nice renditions of the trombone and trumpet solos, acoustic bass, piano, and sea-shell trumpet backgrounds.

Bottom Line

The Harman Kardon Enchant 800 certainly provides much better sound quality than my Sony TV’s onboard audio—and, I’d wager, most other TVs’ internal speakers. Dialog intelligibility is better, the bass is deeper, and the overall sound is cleaner—though typical TV sound sets a very low bar. Adding an Enchant subwoofer would improve the bass significantly, but that doubles the cost of the system, which is already high.

I was unable to hear much in the way of surround effects, but I think that has more to do with the room it was in than the soundbar itself. I’m sure the surround effect would be more pronounced in a room with reflective side walls.

On the downside, I found several operational drawbacks. For one thing, the Enchant 800 does not respond to the TV’s volume and mute commands if you are using an HDMI connection. Another problem with the HDMI connection is that the soundbar wakes up from standby mode with the ARC input selected, not the HDMI input. Finally, I wish any of the sound-mode presets could be saved in the user memories after adjusting the bass.

At nearly $700, the Enchant 800’s price is quite high. You can get very good soundbars for far less, and in most cases, they include a wireless subwoofer. Many provide simulated surround, while others come with actual surround speakers. Granted, that makes setup more complicated, but the sense of immersion is much greater.

While the Harman Kardon Enchant 800 does provide better sound quality than most TVs’ onboard speakers, that improvement is not big enough to justify its price tag. Other soundbars offer similar improvement for much less and often include a wireless subwoofer. In the end, I’m afraid I cannot recommend this one.

On-the-go music lovers will be intrigued by the new Bose Frames—at least while the sun’s up. This $200 personal audio device consists of Bluetooth micro speakers integrated into the bulked-up arms of eyeglass frames.

These “sunglasses with a soundtrack,” as Bose calls them, are stylish though not stylistically groundbreaking (the Alto version conjures the look of the classic Ray-Ban Wayfarer), and they deliver surprisingly substantial sound without requiring you to plug anything into your ear canals (the speakers sit just forward of your ears when you put them on).

The pitch is similar to the one Bose made for its SoundWear Companion neck-band speaker in late 2017: A personal listening experience that doesn’t cut you off from the world. You’ll still hear the traffic; you won’t miss “Hey buddy, you dropped your wallet” warnings; and you won’t be putting out any antisocial “don’t bother me” vibes.

Bose

One problem with the SoundWear concept, as Frames  senior project director Mehul Trivedi confided in a recent press briefing, is that the cloud of music floating around your head might irritate the people around you. SoundWear, Trivedi said, is best used “where you’re off on your own, hiking, biking or running.”

How Bose Frames are designed

Bone conduction headphones, which send sound to the inner ear through the bones of your skull, are another lightweight, non-invasive means of delivering personal audio. But those can be irritating for some, so the engineers at Bose took a different tack. They start with custom stereo transducers (“our smallest, slimmest speaker,” according to Trivedi) and package them in multi-ported acoustic chambers in the arms of the sunglasses. “Precise geometry directs sound to the listener’s ears at full volume, but suppresses the leakage in other directions to just one percent of that,” Trivedi said.

This is something of a twist on the near-field noise-cancelling technology deployed in Bose’s QuietComfort line of headphones. Instead of sampling and phase-cancelling the sounds of the outside world, the “far-field” tech in the Bose Frames uses ports and processing to sample and squash any sound leaking out of the shades in unwanted directions. Passers-by hear nothing.

Bose

It worked quite well in my testing. Keep the Frames’ volume at a comfortable 50 percent or lower, and someone standing three feet away will hear barely a peep, even in a dead quiet room.  Stroll down the street or ride a bus, awash in ambient noise, and you can crank the Frames to their moderately loud, wind-in-your ears max without disturbing your fellow travelers.

The Frames keep the design simple and as light (1.6 ounces) as some conventional sunglasses by having just one button on the right arm that’s single-, double-, or triple-tapped to turn on power, open the microphone for commands, play/pause music, and skip forward or back on a playlist. You can also initiate, answer, and juggle phone calls with that self-same button, so long as you keep your taps straight. Volume can be raised or lowered—tediously—by voice command. Honestly, it’s quicker to just grab your phone and work the levels there.

How Bose Frames sound

The Bose Frames produce a satisfying, brightly articulated, 3D-ish sound field, an airy presentation that I found worked well with the light and medium density pop, jazz, and classical music I’ve been tapping into on my iPhone X.

Bose

Bose

Connecting the Frames to a Samsung Galaxy Note 8 Android phone proved more satisfying for hands-free applications. My voice commands to Google Assistant were clearly understood and fetched music from a variety of sources, plus radio channels and podcasts from TuneIn (which is supposed to be actively available on iPhones, too.) The smarter assistant even proffered enhanced info I hadn’t requested. When asking for a Dawes playlist, for example, I learned that the band was coming to town in two days.

When speaker-phoning with Frames, the microphone clarity was judged mildly muffled by listeners at the other end of the call, but (on the favorable side) low in ambient noise pickup. I think both observations are due to the microphone being located on the inside of the sunglasses’ right arm.

Charging the Frames is accomplished with a proprietary magnetically connected power line that plugs into any USB charger. A two-hour charge delivers about 3.5 hours of music listening at moderate levels, or 12 hours of standby time. You obviously can’t wear and charge the Frames at the same time.

Bose

Bose Frames and augmented reality

Powering down the Frames is dirt simple: Just take ‘em off and flip ‘em over, “something people are always doing when they lay sunglasses down on a counter,” said Trevedi. This trick is made possible by an onboard gyroscope, part of a nine-axis head-tracking, direction-sensing (and steering) circuit and a supporting augmented reality software platform known as Bose AR.

Tapping the Frames’ onboard sensors, Bose’s smartphone app, and your smartphone’s GPS hardware, these audio spectacles will be able to ascertain where you are, how fast you’re moving, and what you’re looking at. On walking tours, a voice whispering in your ears will direct you where to look and when to turn, sharing insights along the way, so you can keep your shaded gaze on objects and scenery, instead of stumbling along with your eyes cast down at a guidebook or map. Pickpockets will hate these things.

Bose

Most of that potential, however, won’t be delivered until the second stage of Bose Frames’ evolution. Bose recently acquired the audio-tour-guide developer Detour, which has already curated more than 100 strolls through towns foreign and domestic. Bose has also announced a $50 million investment fund to kick-start other projects that use its Bose AR SDK (software development kit), and it has announced collaborations with the likes of ASICS Studio, Strava, TripAdvisor, TuneIn, and Yelp. Think educational tutoring, gaming, fitness coaching, meditation, and more.

Bose won’t reveal any details about the first wave of available apps until March, at the South by Southwest (SXSW) music/film/interactive media conference in Austin, Texas. That’s also when Bose intends to launch Frames globally. For now, they’re available only in Bose retail stores in the U.S. and on the brand’s domestic website.

Mum’s the word on product variations, too. There are just two SKUs available today: the aforementioned Alto, and the smaller, rounder Rondo. Both of those frames have a matte black finish with medium-gray-tinted UVA/UVB-blocking lenses. Trivedi hinted that different colored frames will eventually come to market, and that users will be able to have Frames fitted with prescription lenses. Personally, I’d like to see a pair with Transitions lenses that darken in sunlight and turn clear indoors and at night.

With life-like graphics and vast, immersive games, we’re certainly spoiled by today’s gaming systems, but there’s still something to say about that rich feeling of nostalgia you get when looking back on the old-school games and consoles of our past. The GameBud Portable Gaming Console lets you relive the gaming glory days with 400 8-bit games you can play on the move; and it’s on sale for only $34.99.

Whether you want to take a quick 15-minute break or kill a couple of hours, the Gamebud will be your perfect source of entertainment. It features 400 classic 8-bit games built right into it so you’ll always find something to suit your mood. It has a color screen, 3-hour battery life, and it’s small and lightweight so it’ll easily pack into your carry-on bag.

Relive the good old days of gaming with the GameBud Portable Gaming Console. You can get it on sale today for only $34.99, more than 50% off its usual retail price. 

 

GameBud Portable Gaming Console – $34.99

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After searching more than half a year for a new chief executive, Intel decided the best candidate was the guy already running in the company: Robert “Bob” Swan, the “acting” and now permanent CEO.

Technically, Intel promoted from within to hire Swan, who had served as the company’s chief financial officer since 2016. But Swan’s resume paints him as an outsider, with stints at fab tools maker Applied Materials, and nine years as the CFO at eBay. Swan has had CEO experience, but only running Webvan, an online grocery service that entered bankruptcy in 2001.

There’s no question Swan comes as a surprise, as he was reported not to have wanted the job in the first place. “Swan told me that as he was in the interim CEO role, he started to like and enjoy it,” analyst Pat Moorhead said in an email. “I do think Intel’s strategy is the right one; the company needs to improve its execution, and bringing in an outsider without Intel experience didn’t make sense.”

As the chief financial officer, Swan’s role within Intel was often behind the scenes. To many, then, he’s a closed book. Intel’s message in announcing Swan is of a guy determined to stay the course.

Little to say

Take, for example, Swan’s letter to his employees, partners, and customers. We learn little: Swan’s four key takeaways are that Intel will be “bold and fearless,” that its strategy of transforming from a PC-centric to a data-centric company remains unchanged, that it must continue to execute, and that it must continue to evolve its culture—boldly. 

Not a lot of insight there. In fact, Intel chairman Andy Bryant, himself a former CFO, arguably did a better job summing up where Intel is now than Swan did.

“As Intel continues to transform its business to capture more of a large and expanding opportunity that includes the data center, artificial intelligence and autonomous driving, while continuing to get value from the PC business, the board concluded after a thorough search that Bob is the right leader to drive Intel into its next era of growth,” Bryant wrote. Not much, but it’s something.

Really, though, what’s always been in question at Intel was how firmly the company believed in its strategy. Processors, especially for the PC and data center, remain the company’s lifeblood. Go too far astray, and Intel wanders into the embedded and IoT markets where the competition heats up. Intel’s had an on-again, off-again relationship with communications, too. For the last few years, former chief executive Brian Krzanich’s keynotes at the Consumer Electronics Show were a circus of drones and sensors. This month, at CES 2019, “IoT” wasn’t mentioned once.

It does seem, however, that Swan seems committed to growing new businesses. “Our ambitions have never been greater and we have a relatively small share of the largest addressable market in Intel’s history,” Swan wrote to employees. “We must remain focused on playing offense and innovating for an increasingly data-centric world.”

A hands-off approach?

What Swan and Bryant seem to be signalling is that Swan will be a hands-off type of guy, more inclined to let Intel’s business leaders set the direction as opposed to aggressively charting his own vision. It’s not hard to imagine that he’ll ask for a solid business case, too. “Leadership is a team sport and is about bringing together the team, setting the direction and letting the team be unencumbered – so they can achieve things nobody thought was possible,” Swan wrote in his letter.

There’s no question that Swan has succeeded in the seven months or so since former CEO Brian Krzanich unexpectedly stepped down last June. But it’s also unclear how Swan plans to proceed. 

MSI Afterburner isn’t exactly game capture software, but like Nvidia’s GeForce Experience, it’s a popular program that gaming enthusiasts might already have on their system. Afterburner is predominantly a graphics card overclocking tool—and not just MSI graphics cards, either—that comes with a second download called RivaTuner Statistics Server. RTSS is a great tool for limiting the frame rates of your games if your GPU is working harder than necessary. Together these two pieces of software can not only overclock and tweak your system, but record game capture video as well.

Note: This review is part of our roundup of the best game capture software. Go there for details about competing products and how we tested them.

In Afterburner 4.5.0 you get to the video capture settings by clicking on the settings cog icon in the center of the main dashboard. Then in the new window that opens, use the scroll arrows in the upper right corner to get to the Video capture tab. By default, you configure your own hotkey to start recording, but you can also set it to automatically record every time you start a game.

IDG

There are many other settings below that. You can change the video and container formats, for example, though your choices are limited. The default video format is MJPG, but there’s also VFW, NV12, and RTV-1. As for the container format (the file type for the video) your only choices are AVI and MKV. Still, this is a power user tool and for those who care it’s an excellent opportunity to customize video captures.

Afterburner also lets you set the quality type as a percentage as opposed to the usual “low, medium, and high” options.

You can adjust the frame size, the frame rate (from 0 up to 100), frame rate limit, and where you want to save your files. For audio you can record both the game sounds and your own microphone.

Some of these features are quite common in other suites, but the fine grain tools—such as the frame size, and the choice of compression and container formats—are not.

Performance

IDG

For this round of testing, we used our standard budget test rig and left all settings as-is with no adjustments, the only exception being that we set ctrl + F5 to be our hotkey for starting a recording.

Running the Metro: Last Light Redux benchmark three times with everything set to low, our rig went from an average frame rate of 58.67 without recording software active down to an abominable 39fps with Afterburner engaged. It went from nearly hitting the “golden standard” of 60 frames per second to just barely above console level. That’s still playable, mind you, but it offers a striking difference in play quality.

Testing with The Division benchmark didn’t fare much better,. Without Afterburner running we were hitting 56.3 frames per second, and that dropped to 42.5fps with the capture software running.

Conclusion

A lot of PC enthusiasts adore MSI Afterburner as an overclocking tool, and with a mid- to high range gaming machine, Afterburner’s screen capture tools are probably just fine. If you’ve got a budget rig, however, you can do much better. On top of that, Afterburner is not easy to use, the amount of tweaking is probably overkill for most, and the fact that it depends on Riva Statistics Tuner (meaning you need two tools to do one job) isn’t great.

Bottom line? This is not the screen capture tool you’re looking for.