A sound system that’s out of this world
Plus, solve a pirate mystery and turn your music collection into an interactive magazine
By Tim Martin
Naim Uniti Atom £1,999 Slab-sided, gleaming black, fronted in rippling colour and surmounted with a delightfully tactile wheel, this top-end integrated sound system could be an object from an interplanetary future. Happily it does a ravishing job with Earth music as well. The Uniti Atom streams from Spotify, Tidal, your phone, Bluetooth, Chromecast or what you will, and the noise it makes is quite extraordinary. Everything I’ve fed it has come out roomy and muscular, with each detail popping. Perhaps it is alien tech after all.
Return of the Obra Dinn PC/Mac, £15.49 Falmouth, 1807: the ghost ship Obra Dinn arrives in harbour, without a captain, without a crew and full of corpses. An insurance investigator (that’s you, kids) is charged with unravelling its gruesome fate. Armed with that classic tool of the insurance investigator, a time-reversing stopwatch that lets players slip into the last moments of the violently dead, you will stalk a strange mindscape rendered in old-fashioned stippled graphics. The central logic puzzle is a sort of immersive-theatre Sudoku: who were these people? How did they fit together? How did they die? The gloriously extravagant execution stretches the little grey cells like nothing else in the medium.
■Roon $119/year If you’re into quality digital music but miss the comforting epiphenomena of the old-school record industry – liner notes, album art, record-shop chat, music mags and posters – then this sumptuous media app may hold the answer. Roon reaches its tendrils into your music collection and presents the result as a kind of streamable magazine, with artist biographies, track credits, professional reviews and recommendations for further listening. And it links up with the hi-res streaming services Tidal and Qobuz, providing recommendation rabbit-holes of near-unlimited depth to wriggle into.
More from 1843 magazine
1843 magazine | Inside the Kenyan cult that starved itself to death
During covid-19 a preacher lured thousands of people into a remote forest. Then he told them to stop eating
1843 magazine | Houston, Texas: where asylum cases come to die
Some immigration lawyers relish a challenge
1843 magazine | Robert F. Kennedy junior doesn’t care if he condemns America to Trump
He’s a tree-hugging conspiracy theorist – and he’s running for president