Also dubbed the wind up iPod, the Trevor Baylis Eco Media Player is a great gadget for camping trips, long car rides, or anyone who wants to avoid the inconvenience of a dead battery. This multimedia player can run for a good 40 green minutes off of one minute of winding. Besides winding, it can also be charged with a standard USB cable.

When fully charged it is claimed to be able to hold a charge capacity of up to 20 hours, but when put test is was found to be capable of 32 hours of audio playback and a surprising 17 hrs of video.

A few good steps up the evolutionary scale than the windable torch (which is also available through Trevor Baylis), the Eco Media Player incorporates various other functions such as music and video player, FM radio, photo viewer, voice recorder, flashlight, and it can be used to charge a cell phone.

If you don’t want to listen with headphones you can use the built in mono speaker. It also comes with 2 GB of space which makes it useful as a storage device as well.

Although it has been out for awhile, it has received little competition and still remains the best of its kind in the market. It has its downsides though, firstly it’s a bit expensive - £129.95 new. It’s also quite difficult to arrange the audio files since it doesn’t support ID3 tag sorting.

There’s an interesting device out there that not many people have heard of. It’s called the Neurophone and allows sounds to be perceived in the brain yet bypasses the ears. Among other applications, it can provide the deaf with an even more rich and stimulating means to experience sound.

Normally hearing takes place when vibrations in the inner ear are converted into electrical nerve signals and transmitted to the brain. But with the Neurophone, ultrasonic electrical signals can be transmitted to the brain via the skin. It turns out that ‘hearing with the skin’ has many advantages over hearing with the ears. For one, the neurophone is claimed to greatly reduce the element of distraction normally experienced when sounds register in the ears. It has also been reported to increase concentration and the ability to remember what is heard, making it a useful tool for learning languages or listening to audio books. The most interesting part, however, is that regular use of the device leads to the development of neural pathways associated with perceiving ultrasonic sounds. The development of these neural pathways, in turn, leads to harmonization between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and imparts the listener with a greater sense of well being and resistance to stress.

The Neurophone was invented in theory by a young man named Flanagan at the age of 14. At 17 he was named one of the top ten scientists in the US by LIFE magazine. Although he encountered a lot of opposition, after 10 years he was finally granted a patent when he demonstrated the effectiveness of his invention on a deaf worker in the patent headquarters in 1968 (#3,393,279).  Since then it has undergone many innovations and now it even available online

Canal phones are becoming more and more popular these days as a classy way to tune out.

Where people would previously strap on a pair of head-muff speakers to reduce ambient noise, the sleek canal-phones that are designed to do just that while remaining much less obtrusive.

Canal-phones are so called because they sit snugly inside the ear-canal, getting the listener more intimate with his music while distancing him from the noisy environment. Canal phones are much more inviting alternative to those bulky headphones since at such a small size they can retain the same noise canceling effect.

Denon has recently expanded its product inventory to include a variety of canal-phones. Although its prices are standard (and high at that), it has a foot in the door on its competitors when it comes to its tangle resistant cable.

Unlike similar models made by Sennheiser, the AH-C751 by Denon doesn’t turn into a birds nest after 5 minutes in your pocket. When put to the test, it measures up to its hefty £70 price tag in terms of craftsmanship and style - with firm aluminum casing and reinforcement fittings at the nodes to prevent the hair-thin wires from wearing down.

The package is more attractive since it comes with extra ear fittings of varying size and an extension cable for practical use with a cell phone.

This is a very interesting technology that could benefit everyone but nearly no one knows about it. In short it consists of subjecting each hemisphere of the brain to an audio tone of slightly different frequencies. The brain then finds the median between the two tones (usually between .5 and 12 Hz) and the brainwaves begin to slow down in resonance with that frequency.

It’s clinically proven to be useful for wide range of purposes; for instance, relaxation, meditation, lucid dreaming and attaining outer-body experiences (OBE). It is also used as an aid for concentrating (just the excuse students are looking for to wear headphones in class). In fact, this technology is being used to treat ADD and ADHD in students. Psychoacoustics has blown the mystical shroud off the topic of meditation as well. With this technology, beginning meditators can effortlessly achieve states of meditation that correspond to neural resonance at lower frequencies in the theta/delta range.

• Delta (0.5 - 4 HZ) - Associated with deep levels of relaxation, sleep and healing
• Theta (4 - 8HZ) - Associated with tranquil states of awareness in which vivid internal imagery often takes place
• Alpha (8- 12 HZ) - Relaxed nervous system, ideal for stress management, accelerated learning and mental-imagery/ creative visualizations.
• Beta (12-30 HZ) - Associated with waking/alert states of awareness k-complex (30 - 35HZ). Clarity and sudden states of integration, the “ah-ha experience”
• Super High Beta (35 - 150 HZ). Psychodynamic states of awareness

The big names in the industry are Brain-Sync and Hemi-sync, each have a website where you can preview and download their various products. Center-Pointe has done the most research in terms of the spiritual application of this technology and their site is well worth a visit.

Article Copyright © Florian Dobson