This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

If you’re a music aficionado, it’s time to upgrade to one of the most unique sets of headphones on the market – and VentureBeat has a set available for a limited time at our VB Store.

These ETZ Headphones from 3EIGHTY5 AUDIO are designed specifically for anyone looking to enhance their audio experience. And now for a very limited time you can bring flawless and unique sound right to your ears for $150 through our VB Store!

(Note: This sale is available to continental USA customers only.)

The rich mahogany wood earpieces covered with a lacquer finish truly delivers a one-of-a-kind sound experience that can’t be found anywhere else on the block. When you’re not using your headphones, these beauties will fold flat and store in a matching lacquer wooden storage case to keep them clean and safe.

For details on the ETZ Headphones, including the fine print and specifications, check out the VB Store page.

If you’ve considered buying high-end headphones such as Beats by Dre these have arguably better sound quality with more luxury and style…for half the price. So head over to the VB Store and pick up luxury headphones at their finest – and at a price that is just as fine: only $150. Grab this offer while you can!

This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

Do you get frustrated when you’re in the middle of an intense workout and your earphones fall out or the cables get in the way? Then this VentureBeat offer will take care of that – and more.

The Sport-Fi line and Sport-Fi S6 workout package allows you to forget about your earphones and fully immerse yourself in your activity – and all for just $22!

This package is loaded with features, including the following:

• Memory Wire Solution: The S6 utilizes innovative memory wire design, which loops over-the-ear to help keep cables out of the way and your earphones locked in for a secure yet comfortable fit.
• Modular Cable System: A modular cable system combats excess cable length. The included armband and shirt clips insure your music stays close to you. Not only can loose cables rip phones from your ear but they can be potentially dangerous as well.
• Energy Booster: The S6’s deep insertion in your ear immerses you in your music and boosts your energy, keeping you in rhythm and in the zone during your workout.
• Six Different Ear Tips: Six different types of ear tips ensure the fit in your ear canal will be comfortable and provide the best sound while blocking out external noise, enabling you to listen at quieter volumes and protect your hearing.

To learn more about the Sport-Fi line and Sport-Fi S6 workout package – including all of the important details surrounding this deal – check out the VB Store. (Please note: This offer is available for continental USA customers only – but includes free shipping.)

Smart, effective and durable, the S6 is even sweat resistant for those intense workout sessions. So if you want to your headset to keep up with you and your active lifestyle, head over to the VB Store now and grab this offer while you can!

Once, I was sitting at the legendary Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset Strip, nursing a cranberry and tonic (and a Djarum Black) at the outside patio bar. I looked to my right, and who should I see? Rock god Lemmy Kilmister, ringleader of Motörhead, one of the most objectively awesome bands of all time.

At that moment, I had a one-track mind. I sat frozen in time and space, wanting desperately to bite the bullet and go say hello — even just to tell him I was a huge fan — and end up with tales of glory with which to regale my metalhead friends ever after.

But I ended up chickening out like a loser and deciding that in this case, the chase was better than the catch. By the time I got the nerve to say hi, it was too late, too late — Lemmy was absorbed in a video poker with a face that said “Die, you bastard” to anyone who might have the temerity to interrupt him.

Meanwhile, back at the funny farm, I’m going through my morning email, and what should I find?

Motörheadphönes! The newest gadget from music legends to satisfy your burning earholes with expensive ‘phones and ‘buds for those times when the devil’s in your head and you need to rock out.

Beer drinkers and hell raisers, this line was created (or at least marketed) with you in mind. The earbud line, with models called Overkill and Trigger, are all-metal, “no silly plastic pieces here!” And the headphones, called Motörizer, Iron Fist, and Bomber, promise to deliver DJ-caliber sound quality and cradle-to-the-grave physical durability — fit to earn the ultimate badge of honor, the logo of the self-proclaimed “loudest band in the world.”

For the naysayer with a heart of stone hollering, “I won’t pay your price; I don’t believe a word,” we can only respond: Listen to your heart and shut your mouth. God was never on your side.

These mean machines were built for speed and will leave you stone deaf in the USA. For example, the Bomber ‘phones bring you “extra powerful 30mm speakers that can take stand six times the standard amount of power.” You might think that’s overkill, but the fools will tear ya down, steal your face, and leave you smiling like a killer.

So, one more f***ing time: If you were born to raise hell and demand ace-of-spades-level quality and sheer loudness from your audio gear, don’t play fast and loose with those Beats pieces of garbage. Seriously, Dre and those guys are out to lunch. Don’t waste your time; you’ll be the one to sing the blues.

Motörheadphönes are enjoying a preview at CES next week. Down the line on another perfect day, I hope to be able to report back to you, “I got mine.”

Can you spot all the Motörhead song titles in this post? List them in the comments for your chance to win!*

*You get NOTHING! You LOSE! Good DAY, sir!

That trend continued today as Beats announced the Pill, its elegant answer to devices like the Jawbone Jambox and HiddenRadio. The $199 compact speaker offers Bluetooth connectivity,  seven hours of battery life, and even tap-to-pair functionality via NFC. As with the Jambox, you can also use it for audio conferencing.

The Pill’s sound quality is about as good as you’d expect for a device of its size, though Beats co-owner Jimmy Iovine says the company didn’t sacrifice audio quality for the sake of the device’s footprint.

“We will not put something out because it’s small. We will only put something out when it sounds great,” Iovine said.

Alongside the Pill, Beats also announced the Executive, a $299 pair of noise-canceling headphones aimed at highly mobile professionals with money to burn. While comparable headphones often sacrifice audio quality for the sake of noise cancellation, Iovine said that Beats managed to bridge that gamp.

“To balance between noise-canceling and powerful sound is very, very difficult. I think we’re the only company that’s gotten close to getting it right,” Iovene said.

Third on the list of today’s announcements is UrBeats, Beats’s new $99 in-ear headphones.

What’s notable about all of Beats’s announcements today is that they are the first products its created without the aid of Monster. The two companies severed that deal January, which means that Beats is all on its own from this point on.

“We completely own our destiny,” Beats Electronics CEO Luke Wood said today.

Photos: Ricardo Bilton/VentureBeat

In late 1958, John C. Koss created the first portable music system, the Koss 390 phonograph player.

Bulky and heavy by today’s standards, it was compact for a time in which stereo systems were more like furniture. But when Koss showed the player at an audio exposition, audiophiles virtually ignored it, gravitating instead to the true innovation: the world’s first-ever stereo headphones Koss paired with it for demonstration purposes.

Fast forward 60 years.

In 2010, the Koss company found an old battered 390, literally at a garage sale. The company bought it and restored it. Then earlier this year, John’s son Michael, now chief executive of Koss, connected his father’s first invention to one of his own: the first Wi-Fi-powered internet-addressable headphones available on the market.

He then put a record — one of this father’s favorites, Sinatra’s Fly Me to The Moon — on the turntable, and listened to it in the highest possible MP3 quality, wirelessly. The first true over-the air internet headphones were born.

Fly me to the moon

John Koss started the Koss Corporation with a $200 wedding gift that he diverted — with his wife’s permission — to buy 20 broken-down TV sets to refurbish and rent.

But it was only in 1958, when he paired the first stereo headphones with his “portable” music system, that he introduced the world to personal music … sparking a revolution that lives on in the ghetto blaster of the 80s, the Walkman of the 90s, and the iPod of the 2000s.

“Now, we want to deliver that same experience via the web, wirelessly, directly addressable to any individual wearing this device,” says Michael Koss.

Personal music, without wires

The new product is Striva Pro. Koss sent me a pair of the $450 over-the-ear headphones to test — and they’ll be hard to let go after this review is written.

The goal was simple: freedom from wires. All wires.

“We’d been doing a ton of research on headphones, and the one thing that came out was a consistent complaint about wires,” Koss said. “While we’ve had wireless solutions since the 70s … infrared … radio … BlueTooth … we wanted to make something that works over Wi-Fi.”

Wi-Fi has become so ubiquitous that the company would be able to ride existing wireless infrastructure practically everywhere. That realization gave Koss an idea.

“When we did that, we realized we could run it in an infrastructure mode, and anywhere those headphones could connect to the internet … they could receive the same data from our transmitter.”

That’s the key innovation behind the Striva Pro.

It means that I can put on the Koss Strivas in my home, connect to my home Wi-Fi, and enjoy any stream of music available on the internet, wire-free. And I can take the Strivas to Starbucks, my office, the gym, or any other location on planet earth with open Wi-Fi and do exactly the same.

The Strivas have a battery, Wi-Fi chip the size of pencil eraser, and a tiny microprocessor all onboard. Everything is self-contained, wireless, and simple.

Rock it old-school and new-school

Or, of course, you can also just attach the Strivas to my iPhone and play music right from there, just like ordinary headphones.

But what if you want to be wireless even when Wi-Fi is not available? Koss has you covered with the ability to stream wirelessly to the Strivas from non-internet sources.

Source: Koss

The CAP, or content access point. About the size of a book of matches.

Along with the Striva headphones, Koss includes a content access point, or CAP. Tiny, the size of a book of matches, the CAP  plugs into any headphone jack. Attach your CAP to your iPhone with the included cable, and you’ve just set up a Wi-Fi transmitter. You could conceivably leave your MP3 player in your gym bag, and go work out wirelessly without the need for a publicly available Wi-Fi access point.

“Our chief financial officer puts his phone in his locker and listens to the music in the gym … up to 300 feet away,” says Koss. “We’ve had it up to 500 feet.”

Or you can simply plug the CAP into your computer and stream wirelessly from iTunes, Windows Media Player, or any other app playing sound on your PC.

Frankly, it’s a game-changer: music from the cloud — or your hard drive — straight to your headphones. It’s all of your music plus the infinite variety of the internet, all available without cables.

How does it work?

Koss didn’t spare much with the Striva. In the box you get no fewer than nine components: the headphones themselves, one charger for both the headphones and the CAP, the CAP itself, and a variety of wires of varying sizes for every possible need. Plus, you get a very nice case.

Source: Koss

Selecting the streams and channels you like …

Once out of the box, you pull out the headphones, plug the CAP into your phone, and go to MyKoss.com.

There you walk through a process of syncing the headphones to the CAP and setting up your music preferences, which involves choosing various channels and streams from internet-based radio stations. Channels are groups of similar stations; streams are individual stations.

None of the music originates with Koss: MyKoss.com simply is the handshake that connects your ears with the internet radio stations you’ve selected.

Once you’ve set up your preferences and synced your CAP and headphones, music from whatever channels you’ve selected will flow automatically to your Strivas. It’s not difficult, but it’s not as easy as it could be either (don’t expect granny to do it herself).

Using the Strivas takes a little bit of instruction, something you might not have had to undergo for any other pair of headphones before, due to Koss’ Apple-ification of the user interface: as few buttons as possible. In fact, there are just two controls: a joystick-like uni-button (my term) on your left ear, and a volume control strip.

Source: John Koetsier

Everything but the kitchen sink …

Turn the Striva on by pressing the joystick — a short press to go into Wi-Fi mode, a long press to look for a broadcasting CAP. Swipe it back for the next stream, forward for the previous stream, push up to “approve a song” … or hold back for the next channel, hold forward for the previous channel … you get the picture.

After a while it’s second nature, but you will be checking the (very good) visual manual more than once.

Volume is a bit of a tricky beast: A long control strip curving up the side of the left headphone. It senses your finger and adjusts the volume up or down as you swipe.

Well, that’s the theory.

In practice, volume control is a little hit and miss, and you’ll find yourself adjusting up and down multiple times to get exactly what you want. I tried different methods: full finger, fingernail, fingertip. Ultimately, a full finger press moving at medium speed seemed to work best. There’s a definite cool factor, and fewer moving parts mean great reliability, but the control strip is exactly optimal right now.

What about the sound?

And audio quality? I asked Michael Koss about that.

“Like everything else, it’s garbage in, garbage out. We’re dealing right now in a society that’s very used to compressed sound … it boggles my mind that I can walk through an airport see teens sharing ear buds, but people have gotten used to that level.”

In practice, I found the headphones to offer excellent sound — depending, as Koss said, on the audio source. Where available, the entire Striva system scales to the quality of 320 kbps MP3 files. That’s better quality than typical music downloaded from iTunes, which is 256 kbps AAC (a different audio codec from MP3).

“We’re quite comfortable with the product we’re releasing. It’s getting the best throughput you can with that technology,” Koss says. “But if the source material is lousy  … we can’t do anything about that.”

Would I buy them?

$450 is not a cheap pair of headphones. And the earbud versions, which are coming in a few months, are $500 … the cost of extreme miniaturization.

There’s also room to improve. The volume control can be made more reliable, and MyKoss could be made into a platform that, perhaps, tweets songs that you say you like.

But having all the music on the internet in your head is compelling. And the music you love, wherever you go, without wires … I’ve fallen in love.

Perhaps it’s sort of like the Retina Display iPad or MacBook Pro. Once you’ve used it, you can’t go back (but if you’ve never experienced them, it’s hard to tell what you’re missing). Having experienced my music wirelessly anywhere I wanted it, it’ll be hard to go back to cords.

And Koss hasn’t skimped on any components with the Striva: all the connectors and wires you need are right in the box.

So would I buy them? I’d have to say yes.

As Michael Koss says, “It’s an IP addressable end point that you stick in your ear.” Welcome to the future.

photo credit: S. Randall Saffen via photo pin cc, flyzipper via photo pin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Major electronics manufacturer Philips debuted a new line of headphones and earbuds targeted at Android phone owners at the Consumer Electronics Show this week.

The company makes some of the best-sounding, affordable earbuds on the market, and now it is extending its focus to Android, which has the largest market share for smartphones in the world. While you can use any pair of standard headphones with an Android phone, these models are specifically designed to work with the Philips MyHeadset Android app that helps make music sound better.

There are four models in the lineup, with three earbud editions and one traditional headband headset. Each model has a microphone for hands-free use, and call management features to answer/end a call, reject a call, voice dial and redial the last number.

One other thing that makes the Android headphone lineup interesting is that if you go to a consumer electronics store, the number of iPhone-focused products heavily outnumbers that of Android products. Whether it’s the mobile section of Best Buy, Target or Walmart, the iPhone and iPod touch accessories always get more love. But as Android’s dominance grows and continues, we’ll likely begin to see more Android-specific offerings.

The Philips Android headphone line will go io sale in the second quarter of 2012. The models range from $30 for the least-expensive earbuds to $100 for the headband headset.

More photos from the upcoming Android line can be viewed below:

For more news out of this week’s Consumer Electronics Show, be sure to check out VentureBeat’s live coverage from CES 2012.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Tired of just pining after Google’s latest flagship phone, the Galaxy Nexus? Now you’ll have a chance to get your paws on one.

VentureBeat is giving away a Galaxy Nexus, as well as a pair of Beats Studio headphones, as part of our holiday contest (sponsored by the app store Appitalism). What better way to forget the holiday doldrums and ring in a New Year?

To refresh, the Galaxy Nexus is Google’s new 4.65-inch behemoth that packs in just about every feature you’d want in an Android smartphone. And the Beats Studio headphones are no slouch either — they’re highest-end model in Dr. Dre’s lineup (a $300 value).

Entering is easy, just follow the instructions below:

1. Follow our VentureBeat and GamesBeat Twitter accounts.
2. “Like” our VentureBeat and GamesBeat Facebook pages.
3. Fill out and submit this form.

Entries are due Thursday, December 29, by noon PST. One winner will be randomly selected next week.

Here are the rules:

• One entry per person.
• You must be over 18 to enter and include a valid email address.
• The contest is open to residents in the U.S. and Canada (excluding Quebec).

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

So you’re still looking for gifts. Well fret not — thanks to our increasingly close relationships with our mobile devices, accessories for phones and tablets also make great gifts. Here are a few cool stocking stuffer ideas that will appeal to anyone.

Phone and tablet cases
Our mobile devices these days often feature large slabs of glass. And while that’s great for enabling the proliferation of touchscreen technology, it also makes our phones and tablets ticking time bombs for scratches, cracks and shattering unless they’re protected somehow. So consider a case for the clumsier members of your friends and family. They’re available in most retail stores these days, and you can also find a wide selection in Apple stores and cellular carrier retail locations.

For the iPhone and iPad, I recommend cases from iSkin, a company that offers a wide variety of attractive designs that are strong enough to let your device survive a tumble. Your choices are more limited where it comes to Android phones, but generally you can find cases at the phone’s respective carrier retail spots. Accessory Geeks has a wide selection of Android cases and accessories, but it may be too late to order in time for Christmas.

GelaSkins: An easy way to customize mobile devices
Instead of a case, you can opt for a GelaSkin – an adhesive print that can spice up the design of phones, tablets, ereaders and more. The skins are designed specifically for individual devices, so they generally fit without issue. They’re also easily removable and don’t leave any residue on your device. The company has artwork available from over 100 artists, and each design looks completely original.

I’ve tested a couple of GelaSkins over the past few months, and I’ve found that they get more attention than just a plain iPhone case. While they won’t offer much protection for your devices, they sure do look cool.

Agloves: Touchscreen capable gloves for the cold

Winter and touchscreen devices just don’t mix. Normal winter gloves have a layer of insulation that prevent capacitive touchscreens from recognizing your inputs. Enter Agloves, a company that has developed winter gloves knitted with conductive material. They’re affordable at around $17.99, and while thin, I’ve found that they stand up to below-freezing temperatures fairly well.

Headphones: Because stock headphones usually stink
Modern smartphones do more than just phone calls, email and texts — they also serve as portable music players. It’s criminal that Apple still includes terrible earbuds with iPhones, and most other phone manufacturers are guilty of the same thing. So do your friends a favor, and get them a pair of headphones that don’t stink.

You don’t have to pay much for good sound — you can snag Sony’s EX71 earbuds for a mere $13.89 on Amazon. If you’re willing to spend a bit more, Sennheiser’s CX500 earbuds are a tremendous value for around $40. You can find a wide variety of headphones in retail stores, but beware of brands that you’ve never heard of. Noise-cancellation headphones sound great, but are usually expensive, so seek out “noise isolating” sets instead.

Go digital: Gift apps, music, games and more
One of the great things about digital marketplaces is that it’s incredibly easy to gift things without ever having to worry about shipping or delivery charges. On iTunes, you can gift apps, games, music, TV episodes (but not whole seasons, sadly) and movies to people instantly. Android’s Market isn’t robust enough yet for that, unfortunately, but you can always gift music, TV, and movies via Amazon.

My recommendations for digital gifts: The addictive new iPhone/iPad game Infinity Blade; Terriers, yet another great TV show canceled before its time; and the Scott Pilgrim iPad app (which is technically not giftable because it relies on in-app purchase, so you’ll have to gift $50 of iTunes credit so your friends can buy the issues on their own).