Orb Audio is roundly seen as being a company that produces decent to excellent mini speakers at a price that is, at the very least, acceptable to a wide strata of the speaker-buying public. We reviewed a set of Orb home theater speakers and our reviewer found them excellent for cinema playback. The company, seeing a niche, has just released the Orb Audio Booster kit, a $356 package with two basic speakers and a little amp, for computer use.

Installation is dead simple: you plug in the speaker wires into a port on the back and then connect the speakers using simple, push-type mounts. You can then add up to four inputs – two RCA and two mini-jacks – and an optional $299 Super Eight subwoofer. Orb, to their credit, screws the speaker wire to the small green connector cage out of the box.

The front has power, volume, and mute buttons along with a light to indiciate current inputs. A clipping indicator rounds out the package. It has a “large/small” switch for use with the “Mod2″ configuration (two Orb spheres on top of each other, daisy-chained).

The Good
Orbs have excellent clarity. What do I mean? Well, when gaming and watching movies over my PC I often found cheaper speaker systems – most notably a Logitech set with tiny subwoofer – to mash most of the instruments and effects into one dense miasma of sound. These on the other hand, offer extremely distinct audio reproduction, allowing for a perceived separation of sound.

Even at high volume these little balls won’t distort and coupled with a Orb’s own subwoofer they create a sound-field that is unmuddied and quite listenable. They’re solid, American-made speakers that look fun and offer excellent reproduction for the price. They are all hand-polished and finished and contain a 3-inch driver.

Because of their small size and simple mounting system you can place these nearly anywhere in a room without much fuss. I usually hate setting up home theatre gear but because the Orbs are small, light, and surprisingly configurable I had no problems with this kit.

The Bad
Without the subwoofer you had better really enjoy the high-end. These speakers offer excellent separation and high-end reproduction but absolutely no bass without a subwoofer. If you have a powered subwoofer lying around the house – perhaps from an old stereo – you can quite simply add it to this kit and experience a considerable improvement in audio.

The Super Eight I tested is a 200 Watt BASH amp with a solid 12x12x12 cabinet and 8-inch driver. This subwoofer, when not tuned correctly, can really shake the room. Thankfully Orb includes a well-written manual so that novices can set their crossover frequencies and set the volume correctly.

That said, you can survive without a sub, but $300 extra will make you much happier.

Finally, one little problem keeps bothering me: the Booster itself. While it’s a handsome device – metal-clad and clearly labelled – it looks surprisingly generic. At CES each year there is a whole hall dedicated to OEM hardware straight out of the assembly lines in China. While the audio sounds fine, it would be a shame to discover that Orb is selling a $10 audio amp at a considerable mark-up and, given the generic nature of the device, I’m sure someone will find an example of it on monoprice or alibaba.com. I’m well aware of the value proposition of commodity hardware but folks who spend nearly a thousand dollars on audio gear may take umbrage at cost-cutting.

Orb Audio states that isn’t the case at all: rather, the Booster was designed and made in the United States, and sports a few features (subwoofer output, four inputs, large/small speaker switch) that are still uncommon on some other amps.

Bottom Line

High-end audio is, arguably, a maze. “Cheap” solutions abound and every audiophile will look down with disdain on your choice, citing various nebulous forum quotes in order to salt the ground before they begin their own exegesis on the value of carbon fiber over composite and how Amp X is better than Amp Y. But most of us just want our music to sound decent.

At $356 for two speakers and a Booster you’re not paying very much for excellent sound. For example, I’m a big fan of a pair of M-Audio studio monitors that are priced at about $800 and offer a full range of audio in a fairly small package. These little Orbs, on the other hand, offer similar sound in a much smaller package and with far-superior bass reproduction, provided you go the Super Eight route.

Orb audio deserves a look – they’re a strong, small company dedicated to direct-to-consumer sales of good audio gear. They aren’t “audiophile” speakers, whatever that means, but they are a far sight better than what came out of the box that your Dell came in and they’re far superior to anything you can get from your average pair of PC speakers.

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Orb, a small company in New York, makes odd-looking speakers with some great sound. They just announced a small speaker/amp combo for $299 which includes two speakers and an optional subwoofer. The handmade speakers come in multiple finishes (I have the copper here at the house, which I personally don’t think go with my rug) but the dark ones look nice.

The super eight subwoofer, a real monster, costs $299, while their larger model costs $598. I’ll have my review of these up soon – I’m having some set-up issues – but for the size they’re excellent.

Orb, a $9.99 iPhone application that should be familiar to home networking buffs, is available now and will stream music from your home computer, photos, and live television from a TV tuner card – all over the Internet. It can even stream input from a webcam to your phone.

The program, not unlike Slingbox, takes media from your home server and passes it through to the application remotely. This means you can watch TV and movies you have stored at home and even keep an eye on the cat remotely.

Ironically, the app only works with PC-based content and tuner cards. Mac and Linux versions are coming soon.

Apparently you simply drop an SD card into this bugger, press a button, and take pictures. It’s designed to fit almost anywhere — they recommend the eyeball of a mannequin — and records up to six hours of video on a 2GB card. Sadly it lasts only 3 hours on battery but that’s enough to roll it through the bus station for some hot upskirt action. Wait… hot upskirt action at the bus station? $299.95 gets you this ball delivered.

Extra points for watching the entire video without turning down the sound.

Orb has apparently found a way around Apple’s RTSP port cockblockery by streaming your goodies as MP4 files. You’ll also be able to use Orb features with Winamp to "turn your home media player into a very limited kind of on-demand radio station for friends," according to The Register.

If this works well enough, the limitation of the storage space on your iPhone or iPod Touch could turn into less of an issue, since you’d be able to access all of your music and videos from wherever you can get a signal.

Orb opens up iPhone [The Register]

Microsoft LiveStation is kind of a Joost-meets-Orb except that it’s live TV (unlike Joost) only and it requires broadcasters to participate (unlike Orb). The guy in the video refers to LiveStation as “Slingbox without the box.” Sort of, but Slingbox doesn’t require broadcaster participation. He’s dead on about the box, though. Slingbox does have a box, LiveStation does not.

LiveStation’s got a real purtty mouth — programmed using Microsoft’s new Silverlight technology and looking to replicate the real-life experience of flipping through your TV channels. I think that this could be a great service, in theory, if they can talk all the major broadcasters into signing on.

That’s going to be a pretty spicy meatball, though. I’ll be floored if they can get sticklers like Major League Baseball, the NFL, and dinosaurs like NBC to play along. The more progressive hipsters like the NHL and, to some extent, ABC and CBS might be easier to woo. Microsoft does have friends in some pretty high places so maybe they’ll be able to pull it off after all.

If this LiveStation project does come to fruition, guess who’s really going to throw a hissy fit? That’s right, your local cable company (and probably DirecTV). I’ve been wanting to bid adieu to shelling out $100/month for TV for quite some time, but there’s been no viable alternative that works well enough to replace TV.

If I could get most of the same channels that I get through Comcast via LiveStation or a similar service, you’d see me pushing Comcast out the door to endure the walk of shame home wearing my least favorite sweatshirt. You can keep the sweatshirt Comcast. I don’t want it back. Not if it means talking to you ever again.

Of course, the holy grail of TV would be a mixture of Slingbox, Joost, Orb, and LiveStation. Ubiquitous access from any computer or TV set, DVR functionality, and free or low-cost access. I think that Joost will ultimately come closest but the Slingboxes, Orbs, and LiveStations of the world will still fill that need for up-to-the-minute news and live sports. It hasn’t been said that LiveStation won’t offer PVR and time-shifting functionality down the road. If they do, they could have a real winner here.

UPDATE: Apparently, this is not a Microsoft project. London-based Skinkers is developing the service independent of Microsoft after purchasing the rights to a Microsoft Research project. Sorry for the confusion.

Microsoft LiveStation: Slingbox Without the Box [TechCrunch]

File trading networks, such as bittorent, are also extremely popular (if sometimes illegal) choices for consumers wanting access to time-shifted television content.

While DVRs are great, content producers and distributors are less than thrilled by the loss in revenue from all those skipped commercials. Also, DVR’d shows cannot be easily transferred to mobile devices or otherwise viewed away from their home television. Some consumers want more flexibility and options.

Enter downloadable television, spearheaded by iTunes.

On October 12 2005, Apple introduced iTunes 6.0 which added support for purchasing and viewing of video content from the iTunes Music Store. iTunes initially offered a selection of several thousand music videos and five TV shows, including most notably ABC’s Lost and Desperate Housewives, as well as the collection from past seasons. New shows are available 24 hours after the initial broadcast. Since that time, the collection has expanded with NBC Universal, USA Network, Sci-Fi Channel shows, and Viacom, in addition to further Disney-owned networks’ shows. iTunes also gives the ability to view Apple’s large collection of movie trailers. Format for purchased Videos is 128 kbit/s Protected MPEG-4 video.

By January 2006, iTunes offered over 40 television shows for download, including, most recently, additions from Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and MTV with episodes of such shows as the Daily Show, Spongebob Squarepants, South Park, and Punk’d. Showtime added some content in February.

The networks, though, are hoping that iTunes will not be the only way people watch TV on their computers. CBS, Fox and ABC are all experimenting with their own direct downloads or streaming.

ABC

ABC is offering streaming versions of a number of its hit shows to viewers within the U.S. for no charge: Lost, Desperate Housewives, Alias, and Commander in Chief. The shows are viewable in 400×700 Flash format. On the plus side, ABC’s offering is browser and platform agnostic, and are free. On the minus side, and these are big ones, you must be online to view the show. You can’t take these with you on a laptop or other device and watch them while on a plane, or otherwise offline. Also, There are a number of short commercials that cannot be skipped. So in the end, ABC is offering a nice way for me to watch time-shifted shows on my PC-enabled living room television, but not much else. See Mike Davidson for more on this.

CBS

CBS is going with downloads, through their CBS On Demand project. Only a single show is currently offered – Survivor – and you must be in the U.S. to use the service. Quality is 640×480 pixels. Shows cost $.99 and must be watched within 24 hours of downloading (again, not a very good option for travelers). You must have a Windows PC to view the shows. They cannot be burned to dvd. Frankly, with all of these limitations I’m surprised they even let you watch the show, period. It’s like they’re begging to fail so that they can say “hey, see, we tried, people don’t want this.” Note that CBS is also experimenting with shows on Google Video.

NBC

NBC is offering a number of shows through iTunes, but has no direct to consumer offering. They offer thirteen shows on iTunes, including The Tonight Show, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Saturday Night Live, The Apprentice, Law and Order, Scrubs and The Office, as well as a number of vintage shows.

FOX

Fox is shaking things up a bit. In April they announced a six year deal with their affiliates to allow them to show back catalog shows on the internet. They are also starting to roll out downloads of the show “24″ through their Myspace property, but I am unable to find much information on it yet.

SUMMARY

It’s going to be a while before the service models are compelling enough for the world to turn away en masse from today’s TV, but it’s clear we’re at the start of a major disruption that will shake content producers (the networks) and the distributors (cable) to the core.

Nothing is close to challenging iTunes yet for downloadable tv dominance (well, except bittorent and DVRs), and it’s unlikely a single network will be able to do much to overcome them. People want to be able to consume their content in one place, and iTunes does a very good job of allowing that. It’s simple, has some flexibility with regard to moving to a device and the shows do not “expire”. The real competition to iTunes is still to come: Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and Amazon, among others, will have product offering in this space sooner or later. (Note: AOL is already streaming a number of vintage television shows to users).

Business models need to change. Content producers cannot rely on network deals, 30 second advertising and, later, dvd sales, to pull in the revenue. Shows will have to stand on their own, and will probably need to be free for the first few episodes to pull in viewers who may eventually be willing to pay. Frankly, I look forward to the day that a show, ignored by the networks, first decides to launch itself on iTunes and go straight to consumers. The press around it would be overwhelming. The first to do it will have a big advantage.

There is a market for third party service providers, too. Services like Meevee are starting to bridge the gap between providing online television listing information and allowing people to actually view the content on their computers. Cozmo.tv and Brightcove are allowing people to control their Tivo’s through their browser. And how long will it be before MobiTV, which currently streams television to mobile devices, is able contractually to simply flip a switch and offer streaming television direct to a PC? They are already making moves in that direction, and Orb offers a similar, free service.

Note: This article was written with my friend Neil Kjeldsen, a new blogger but longtime writer, and someone who knows the television and film space well. Look for more posts by Neil here on TechCrunch.

Oliver put Orb through a very high stress test – by streaming the movie Underworld Revolution from his home PC at 36,000 feet using Conexion by Boeing on his way back from a recent trip to Korea. Everything went very well, he said.

Personally I’d just like to have 100 GB of storage on my phone, but given that is currently a non existent product, streaming via Orb may be a good and free way to go.

Zvents

My friend Ethan Stock showed off Zvents, which launched last night. We’ve written about zvents here and here. In a nutshell, Zvents helps you create and locate the tens of thousands of monthly local events and has tons of awesome ajax, tagging and other web2.0 stuff.

KnowNow

Ron Rasmussen talked about KnowNow, an interesting RSS-based alert system (they call it “elerts”). I’d like to understand this one better and am hoping to sit down with Ron this week.

Orb

Ian McCarthy gave us a tantalizing presentation on Orb, which allows you to stream content from your home computer to any wifi device without the need for any hardware. It works extremely well for video, photos, etc. He even pulled up a video cam in his living room and used Orb to turn the light on. Cool. It’s PC only right now though.

Wink

Michael Tanne took the password protections off Wink today so we could finally get a look. Wink is “people powered search” and methinks they are on to something powerful. They take basic search results and allow people to tag and rank them to create a much better result set. They’ve called their technology “tagrank”.

Damnit, Michael, answer my emails and give me an interview tomorrow.

Allpeers

Matthew Gertner presented on allpeers, an open platform to develop applications on firefox. Allpeers is in private beta currently.

Flock

Bart Decrem gave a Flock demo. What more can I say about Flock? I love it in a way that isn’t natural. If they could find a way to integrate Pandora direclty into the Flock browser, I’d never leave my computer again.

But seriously, I’ve got my hands on the new version and will do a full profile this week.

PubSub

Founder Bob Wyman spoke about PubSub, structured blogging and their new LinkRanks product, which we wrote about here. More on PubSub, our favorite prospective search engine, here.