Yamaha has been working on an interesting sound delivery technology with their sound systems, they call this the “Sound Beam”, which essentially is a more focused chain of sound wave adjusted to give the loudest intensity to the listener and the listener only. With that, you will still be able to listen to your music at a house party with everybody screaming around, and your music will pretty much not be affected or affect the background music. If you feel like turning up your system to full power in the middle of the night you can definitely do that with these Yamaha Sound Projectors, because the beam will only be focused on to the spot you sit, everybody else in the house should not be affected. These Sound Projectors can still support and reproduce REAL 5.1 channels surround sound (real, not virtual, in one body, yes), it can also make use of the walls and ceilings in your house to have the beams bounce off, the system only takes 3 minutes to optimize itself for your room. These sound projectors are mainly used for connecting with your TV, they are currently priced at 825USD in Japan. –Sam Chan

Press release [Yamaha Japan]

Sony announced their WiFi HiFi VGF-WA1 at CES earlier, whilst we don’t have our hands-on with them, those folks from Impress Japan has already reviewed it. It is always good to get some more background information before we import blindly. The WA1 turned out disappointing. The installing process was okay, but not particularly userfriendly, it also required quite some manual tweaking with the ports and connectivity set-ups, it is even worse when you have internet-security programs installed. Secondly, the sound quality was only average, even to an average ear. The built-in 24bit DSP system did however improve the sound quality a bit. Thirdly the WA1 might not be able to support all internet radios, because it is locked onto live365.com for some Sony-reasons, so you can either subscribe to music that you don’t necessarily like, or be happy with the free stations with pretty low bit-rates. So far from what we heard, the WA1 is a no-no, hopefully these will be fixed by firmware updates in the future. — Sam Chan

Nishikawa reviews VGF-WA1 [Impress]