Electric cars sound great until you realise that turning on the stereo costs you mileage. So Bose is hopping on the bandwagon with low-power speaker systems early.

Their new Energy Efficient Series, debuting in the 2011 Chevy Volt, promises to be 30% smaller, 40% lighter, and use 50% less energy than "conventional Bose sound systems."

PopSci.com.au was invited down to the new Bang & Olufsen showroom in Sydney's CBD for the Australian launch of the new BeoSound 5 yesterday. In typical B&O style, the system is completely out of whack with the norm but amazingly simple to use (see image gallery by clicking the link below the image blurb).

To put it simply, the system is made up of a screen, an aluminium dial and a 500GB hard drive that you hide away. You load all your CDs onto the system via B&O software on your computer (or you can have someone professionally do it) and then you sit back and relax.

Story from Gizmodo Australia

After being blown away by the Concert Breeze ceiling fan at CES, we are all about cramming speakers where there were no speakers before. The SoundBulb concept applies that philosophy to the common light bulb.

Story from Gizmodo Australia

iPod accessory maker Maxell is going to release music player earbuds that look like many kids' favourite candy-coated chocolate candy. What could possibly go wrong?!

Even the packaging, by design, screams "EAT ME!" And, also just like the candy, these buds come in multiple colours for maximum toddler confusion: Red, pink, blue, orange, and white.

Thomas Edison has been dethroned as the father of recorded sound. The New York Times is today reporting on a find by American audio historians in Paris of a 10-second recording etched on paper in 1860, seventeen years before Edison invented the phonograph. The device, called a phonautograph, captured the snippet of song by scratching marks onto a paper blackened by smoke. Its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, was a typesetter who was interested in the written preservation of speech. The resulting document was never intended for playback.

Ultrasone iCans (above)

$130; ultrasone.com

Reviewed by Joe Brown

The Claim: The off-center drivers bounce sound off the cartilage of your outer ear instead of shooting it into your inner ear, to make the music seem more like it's coming from speakers.

The Test: I listened to upward of 80 hours of music, from 128-bit MP3 files to vinyl to DVD-audio discs.