Sennheiser HD650

FarOut Labs ProRemote |£60
A32-channel wireless DAWcontrol
surface on your iPad is nothing to be
sniffed at but ProRemote doesn’t come
cheap. Thanks to the Mackie Control
Protocol, it plays nicely with Logic,
Ableton Live and Pro Tools, giving you
touch-sensitive faders, transport controls
and MIDI pads, plus plenty more.
This kind of control would normally
require some serious hardware, and Far
Out Labs claim that ProRemote is like
having four of Mackie’s£1,300 Control
Universal Pro units “but better”! At a
lower price it’d be ano-brainer,sowe
recommend the Light Edition, which only
offers eight channels but comes in at a
more wallet-friendly £12. Greg Scarth
8/10
IK Multimedia GrooveMaker |£6
If your main priority is to get started
making music quickly,GrooveMaker iPad
fits the bill. Available with ready-loaded
House, Hip Hop or Drum ’n’ Bass loop
packs plus more available to download
online, GrooveMaker makes it easy to put
together songs, build arrangements and
mix tracks live. The bundled samples are
good quality and it’safun way of getting
instant results with loops. It’sdefinitely
worth checking out the free demo version
on iTunes. Greg Scarth
7/10
106
Mini Reviews
The latest musical bits and pieces racked and rated
Kingston 128GB V+ Series
SSD Upgrade Kit |£250
kingston.com
Sennheiser
HD650 |£390
sennheiser.com
T
he cost and relatively small
data capacity of solid state
drives has made their
uptake pretty slow,but as
that gradually changes they’re
beginning to gain more interest. This
kit from Kingston makes the process
of replacing anoisy hot laptop drive a
cinch. In the box there’sanexternal
USB caddy,back-up software and
3.5-inch converter brackets and leads
(in case you want to mount the SSD
in adesktop machine).
Fitting the drive was abreeze and
because of the included caddy,our
old grindy hotbox that the SSD
replaced could be demoted to a
useful portable USB drive –great!
Booting Windows 7, or waking it from
sleep with an SSD drive is insanely
fast thanks to its lack of moving parts
and the silence is almost eerie, with
the laptop running much cooler
during normal use. All applications
load so much faster and loading
projects in Cubase and Ableton with
sample libraries and multiple plug-ins
was massively improved. As an
upgrade to alaptop, it’sasignificant
and noticeable improvement, but a
128GB drive for £250 still makes
this aluxury for most people. Ihave
no complaints whatsoever about the
actual product, but it’sstill alittle too
expensive to whole heartedly
recommend. Chris Barker
8/10
Championed by Tocadisco in FM217 and
rumoured to be used regularly by David
Guetta and Eric Prydz, the Sennheiser
HD650s are as open as headphones get,
with large grilles on the outside of their
huge expensive-looking earpieces.
Slip them on and the audio experience
is almost flawless. The mids are crisp and
controlled while the high end is airy and
accurate, acombination so hard to find on
headphones. Their open nature means the
low end is rounded but quite transparent,
and certainly wouldn’tbesuitable for sub
bass mixing. But being open also means
the stereo field is impressively vast. I
would have no problems mixing from start
to finish on these –with aquick monitor
check at the end for very low bass –they
really are that trustworthy and pleasing to
listen to. As ever open phone leakage is
huge here so you’re going to ‘treat’ anyone
sat nearby.These are strictly for the buss,
not the bus. Declan McGlynn
9/10
FMU229.rev_mini 106 6/23/10 4:56:03 PM