Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Dope Tech: The $3500 Bluetooth Speaker!”.
Hey, what’s up guys mkbhd here, welcome back to dope tech, the series where we take a look at the most impressive, most amazing, most incredible tech. That’S out there brought to you by the dope tech shirt, of course, and so in this quarantine edition of dope tech. We’Ve got some tech, that’s around the studio right now, that is still really crazy, impressive. Sometimes we do like a montage version.
Sometimes the whole episode is about one thing: there’s some stuff around the studio to show let’s get into it. Okay, item number: one is this table that i’ve been talking about on twitter and instagram and showing so this is called the sisyphus table. Sisyphus table there’s a bunch of different styles and and types and versions of this.
But what you should know is sisyphus is the figure from greek mythology who is condemned to rolling a huge boulder up a mountain for eternity on this table. That boulder is this steel. Marble rolling through the sand and sisyphus is a rotating magnet positioned by a wi-fi connected robot arm. I’Ve been super into this table for no other reason than just how cool it looks when it’s doing its thing and how i guess easily distracted, i can be by a little marble rolling around, but it’s really cool.
Fundamentally, it’s just a regular table. On top with this thin layer of silica sand that comes with the table itself, you literally just pour it in and spread it out and set it up. Then underneath is the tech itself, which is a computer. That’S rotating this arm around with a magnet on it that controls where that ball goes and it’s a pretty fine-tuned control. As you can see to the point where you know these overlapping lines can create these thin lines and really precise, shapes and designs.
You can add more or less sand too for a different look and there’s an led ring around the table that makes this dramatic evenly lit. Look that i’m super into then, on top of all that, there’s an app there’s, a sisyphus app that lets you control everything. So there are whole playlists of user generated patterns and images that you can have it draw.
Some are simple and some are much more complex and you can even attempt to make your own in the app itself, but it is super hard. Let me tell you to make anything that looks as good as the stuff that’s already there, so i stick with the pre-made ones. It also does this really satisfying erasing sequence after every new piece of art.
I could watch it all day literally, which is, i guess, why i put it in a different room, but really that’s what made it dope tech for me, it’s it’s technically internet connected. It has an app, it is tech, but really it’s moving art. It’S it’s mesmerizing, watching the ball go around in circles and draw these new designs erase.
Everything then draw something new erase it again and just continue perpetually forever, just like the myth itself. Alright, next item up is this guy right here this is the matte black phantom reactor. It’S a wireless speaker, it’s pretty compact! You can see it’s plugged into the wall and it’s most impressive for how small it is versus how incredibly loud it actually gets.
So this version of the phantom is it’s maybe the size of an ipad mini. It’S like eight inches long, six inches wide and it weighs 4.3 kilograms or about 10 pounds. So it’s like a bowling ball. So it’s a super compact design and it’s also pretty simple. So, besides being matte black, it’s nice and clean, it’s the smaller full range driver on the front, and then these two side pieces are the woofers that really move air and then on the back. You have these fins that are literally a heat sink, and the whole idea is the cabinet is so compact and so dense that it produces.
This super loud sound from how much air it moves and it moves a lot of air when it’s playing. You know at high volumes get this massive punchy, rich bass from these big drivers and how much air they they push from. All that small cabinet space. It’S already connected to spotify. Let me play a little quick demo from jordan edmonds, it’s half volume, so i got two of them, but when you get two of the exact same model you can pair them together as a stereo pair. So there’s one over here, one on the other side of the studio and they’re a left-right stereo pair and then, when you connect to it in spotify, it sees it as one speaker and appropriately splits it, and then you get that sweet loud stereo image. It actually does have a little bit of computer on the inside for the record every speaker does, but this one, of course has internet connected features too. So it has an arm, processor and half a gig of ram, and you know your wi-fi chip, that’s all it needs and yeah this speaker is a it’s. A tiny portable noise complaint is what it is. It gets so crazy, loud at high volume uh and has surprisingly little distortion at those high volumes. Not surprisingly, it is a pretty bass, heavy sound overall.
There isn’t really a midsize driver to focus on the mids, so it can kind of feel like a v-shaped eq but honestly for what i’m using it for filling up a room somewhere or just outdoor space. It’S not a huge deal, and i know in the title it says it’s: a 3 500 speaker there’s actually a couple different versions of it: there’s a 600 and a 900 watt version. This is the the 900 watt compact version, but then there’s a bigger phantom. That’S 2 000 watts and then 4 500 watts so you’re over 100 decibels.
Peak at that point, which is nuts but that high-end version costs about four thousand dollars. So you know this is uh a little safer than that. I guess all. I’M really saying is it’s worth the noise complaint? It’S really impressive! Okay, this next one in dope tech is for my fellow video nerds out there you’ll know who you are, if i say, helios 44-2 and your ears perk up a little bit. That’S where we’re going with this one. So in order to understand why this is dope tech, you have to understand, what’s so special about the original helios 44-2.
So this is my helios 44-2 lens. It obviously doesn’t look quite like the rest of the lenses in the collection and that’s because it’s a vintage used russian lens. You can grab on amazon or ebay for about 60 bucks. I’Ve had it for a while, and it’s known for its swirly, bokeh and really fun optical characteristics.
See most modern lenses, especially in the cinema world, are very clinical rectilinear super high on maximizing sharpness, minimizing distortion and giving you the most accurate look possible, and generally that’s good, but sometimes you just want a more fun look to play with. So you might have recognized this swirly background in various mkbhd videos in the past, and these have all come from this one. Little vintage helios lens. It is a 58 millimeter lens and it’s not particularly sharp, and it’s also so old that it’s really not very well built or easy to use, but it gets the job done and the look is fun. So this, as you might have guessed, is, what’s called a rehoused lens, a rehouse version of this and it’s it’s pretty common in the industry to re-house various lenses for certain reasons uh, but for this one it makes perfect sense. So it’s still as optically fun and unique as the helios, because it’s the same glass, but it’s in a barrel that gives it much better build quality, a much longer life and then a much longer focus throw to make it easier to focus on things it gives. It gears for a follow focus if you want to use that it gives it threads for filters, if you want to add those and just overall, a more satisfying, confident feel this one’s made by a company called iron glass.
It’S linked below and it’s awesome so to those wondering where the swirly background shots come from now. You know fun fact: did you know that one terabyte sd cards are just out there in the world now, along with one terabyte micro sd cards as well? This is 350 bucks, so it is pretty expensive for an sd card, but it’s also not insane for a terabyte and the grand scheme of terabytes you can buy anyway. I’D feel a little nervous.
Putting that much data on a card you could just snap in half but i’ll link this below, along with all the rest of the stuff, from this episode in case you’re, uh feeling dangerous. But anyway, there you have it an insane bluetooth, speaker, a magnetic table, vintage rehouse lenses, another episode of dope tech in the books. Thank you for watching and i’ll catch. You guys in the next one peace. .