Acoustical engineers have discovered that sound can actually be used to increase the efficiency of boiling fluids. The sound waves seem to disrupt vapor bubble’s contact with surfaces. Extremely interesting news. If you cook a lot of pasta.

Optimizing your audio is a personalized process. Audyssey provides many custom audio features: from MultEQ, which creates a custom solution for your room to the App for our Audio Dock, you get to be in control of your audio and entertainment.

It’s a view we share with other pioneers in the AV industry and, before one of those pioneers gets forgotten in the shuffle of new technologies and intuitive devices, we wanted to hit pause. Eugene Polley died yesterday. And while his name may not ring bells, his work probably does. He invented the TV remote. A simple device that brought personalized entertainment into the palm of our hands.

Now he may not have known at the time that Adam Sandler would one day star in a movie about the remote control or that Adam Sandler would also star in an MTV game show of the same name, but he probably saw how it could influence our culture. Our air conditioners have remotes. Our AVRs. Even the Audyssey Audio Dock.

So the next time you’re going into your set to turn on Dynamic Volume, take a second to remember Eugene Polley. Because as easy as it is to lose your remote, we don’t want him lost to time.

Finally, some verification that shopping for a new home theater isn’t just a great idea; it’s an investment. Coldwell Banker recently noted homes with good sounding home theaters sell at a better clip than homes without one. 

With the rising price of gas, movie tickets and popcorn, the fun is not so slowly being taken out of movie theaters. Family night is getting expensive and creating that cinema experience at home has some distinct advantages. For one, no one sneers when you text in your own house. And the power of the remote can’t be overlooked: You can pause to go to the bathroom or get another beer, you can talk about the funny parts, the only loud candy wrappers are your own… the list goes on.

And with gaming and cable, watching movies at home is just the half of it. Surround sound can be a huge advantage for immersive video games and the breathtaking sights and sounds of The Discovery Channel and NatGeo are even more awesome in a home theater. For sports fans who can’t make it to the stadium, watching the game from under your own roof can still have that in-person feel.

Now before you get the wrong idea, we still love movies at the theater. And this past weekend The Avengers proved quite a few others do, too. After all, ours is the audio technology inside the IMAX theaters where The Avengers broke the opening weekend box office record. There are times when you just can’t beat the social aspect. Laughing along with 100 other people can be exhilarating.

But if you need to sell your house or just want to give your kids another reason to hang out, get yourself a decent AVR (see our product catalog), set up your speakers with Audyssey MultEQ and bring your movies to life. And, if you already have all the basics, but have been wanting to find a good reason to upgrade your theater, look into the full might of Audyssey DSX and its 11.1 surround sound. Now you have Coldwell Banker to help convince your wife.

Audyssey has been in televisions for a long time. The Audyssey Dynamic Volume, ABX and EQ that make up our Premium TV suite can be found in Insignia, Sanyo and Toshiba sets. We’ll soon be on every set, too. We’ve teamed up with Performance One Media LLC and Out of the Box Group, Inc. to put together a short, made-for-broadcast presentation outlining the impressive benefits of our Audio Dock. Expect to see a full 30 minutes of Audyssey’s own Jim Merk and television personality Jill Nicolini delving into all the details that make our wireless Buetooth® dock so awesome.

Performance One Media and Out of the Box were excited about the project from the get-go. “The first thing I noticed about the Audio Dock was the upright design,” said Rob Scwartz, vice president, Performance One Media, “But hearing the demonstration I was blown away by the clarity and depth the Audyssey technology brings. I bought 20 Audio Docks for my employees and friends. I knew this was a product people wanted to hear about.”

Schwartz’s excitement was key in bringing our message to the airwaves. Putting our product on television is an outstanding way to demonstrate the customizable benefits of the Audyssey App and allow us to get into the nitty-gritty about how technologies like BassXT improve the Dock’s performance.

Along with the audio advancements Audyssey fans are familiar with, the television program will introduce the new Audyssey AR App. It will use augmented reality to guide you through your Audio Dock. You’ll simply start up Audyssey AR, point your iDevice or Android’s camera at the Audio Dock and see it come alive right on your screen, taking you through everything you need to know to optimize your music and media.

For years Audyssey has used our technology to bring you better television. Now we’re excited to be using the television to bring you better technology. Keep your eyes out for the Audyssey program.

Apple’s running a cute new commercial starring Zooey Deschanel. We’re sure you’ve seen it. It gives a nice overview of the power of the iPhone 4S, but we can’t help feeling like it leaves a few questions unanswered. Like why does Zooey ask Siri if it’s raining when she can clearly see out her big, wet window?

Or where’s her pre-war cottage that multiple restaurants are ready and willing to deliver her tomato soup?

But one question we can answer is, “how does she play music through her room by simply speaking into her wireless device?”

The answer is AirPlay and it’s Apple’s impressive wireless format that Audyssey has put into our Audio Dock Air.  With AirPlay, Zooey can not only control her computer’s entire music library from her phone, but also stream that music to any or all of her rooms.

With the Audio Dock Air and AirPlay you just put a speaker in the rooms you want your audio streamed to and start dancing around the house. Put the Dock Air and AirPlay together, and you have the most user-friendly multiroom solution out there.

In our lifetimes music has been played by computers, lasers and thin black tape. Information stored; Information relayed. But for many of us, our first dance started with the drop a needle. And though audio technology has long since passed the record player by, there’s still a magic in the crackle of vinyl. A story.

Is it the up and down curve of a warped disc spinning that mesmerizes us? Maybe the Doppler-like scratch that starts every play while the needle finds the groove.

Now we’re a technology company here at Audyssey so we don’t only geek out about the audio. We could point out how over compression in modern mixing is limiting the dynamic range of a song’s composition. If you don’t believe us, download a remastered version of Van Morrison’s ‘Sweet Thing.’ Notice how you hear every note, beginning to end, and you never touch the volume. It’s a great mix for the car or the kitchen. It rises above the background noise. But, humor us. Slide an Astral Weeks 33 out of the sleeve and spin it.

Turn it up.

Hear the moments when the rhythm guitar whispers. Notice the recording room echo when the vocals swell at the chorus, and then drop to a distant holler as he turns his head from the mic.

Modern remixes condense that. There’s not a note missed, but it’s hard not to feel like maybe we’re missing something else.

We deal with science everyday here. So we could tell you how digital copies of music are flawless. They last longer. It’s just ones and zeros; information that can’t be affected by wear and tear.

There’s no skips. No scratches. Nothing to remind us of the time we bumped the record player. There’s no jumps to startle us during that first kiss. No imperfections to remind us of that perfect moment.

So, yes, digital music is wonderful. It’s audio science at work. But records are something else.

Whatever they are, we know that perfecting audio reproduction to its cleanest, studio-quality state can’t mean removing its soul.

And vinyl has soul.

Or course, internet music stores serve us well. For convenience and selection, they’re certainly unrivaled. But we miss, just a little, the search. The time when music wasn’t just an acoustic experience. It was tactile. It was olfactory. There’s a delicacy trained to fingers that softly roll records from their cardboard slip. An intimacy in undressing. There’s a scent inside the plastic. It’s molded with more than just the dips and dots of the analog signal; It’s molded with the heartbeat of the rhythm.

The exploration of sound was immersive. When you walked into a record store you were met with rows, of boxes, of envelopes, of tracks. You unwrapped music. It was Christmas morning. It was the joy of discovery. Music was revelation.

Now we filter “similar artists.” We slide our cursor across a 30 second sound bite and make a snap decision on its value.

“Eh… I like my tempo more upbeat.”

But what about tempos we haven’t heard?

Let’s try and remember what it meant to let the sound surprise us. To the music lovers like us, we invite you to celebrate Record Store Day on April 21st. Slide your fingers through the files of bands you’ve never heard of. Walk to the player with a stack of mysteries and give them a listen. For more than 30 seconds. Hear how the phonograph sings.

No matter how old you are.

Here’s a story. It’s about child of the 1980’s. It was the era of tape decks and boomboxes. His first record player was built by Playskool and the only thing it knew was the dialogue from E.T. on 45. Until the boy, 5 or so, found his parents box of records. He pulled out a big one, black and green with purple writing.

And for the first time, he heard Van Morrison.

The world lost Levon Helm, the voice behind a musical revolution. He backed Bob Dylan when the folk star went to an electric guitar, lived in Woodstock before the first and most influential musical festival in history came to his backyard, and defined Southern Rock with The Band.  When cancer tried to take his throat, the man that Rolling Stone listed as one of the “100 Greatest Singers of All Time” kept on recording and jamming. Music pulled him through. He taught us that when you have something to say, sometimes it can take only your passion to amplify it.

And his voice continues to urge us all to find our own.

Watch Levon Helms talk to Spinner.com about his cancer and his music.

We at Audyssey will remember Dick Clark, the legendary host of American Bandstand, through the long list of bands and artists he brought to the stage. Names like The Drifters, Bon Jovi, Chuck Berry, Aretha Franklin, Billy Idol, The Jackson 5, B. B. King and Otis Redding really are just tip of the iceberg.

His mark on the industry is indelible and he will be sorely missed.

Audi, the German manufacturer of luxury cars, recently started using the Audyssey Tuning System (ATS) for their car audio. ATS uses MultEQ in real time to quickly and efficiently create the best car audio. It’s a foolproof tool for manufacturers. So when we read that Audi was having some sound issues we knew it couldn’t be with their speaker systems.

It turns out that it’s on the outside of the car. And not because they’re too loud. The problem is that one new Audi model is too quiet.

Audi, always on the cutting edge of technology, has been working on an electric car. And they’ve not only created an efficient battery powered machine, but also a nearly silent one.  Which, apparently, makes it a threat to pedestrians who rely on their aural sense to let them know when cars are near.

Audi’s solution has been to create a car-like sound that’s pleasing to the ear and amplify it from under the engine. The clever designers have also made sure the “engine” pitch varies based on the position of the accelerator.

When Audyssey works with automobile manufacturers we know the inside of the car is going to sound clear and balanced, but now we’re really interested in hearing how the outside of this car will sound.