SMS Audio, founded by rapper Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, and backed by New York Knicks forward Carmelo Anthony, launched sports headphones with fitness data tracking capability in partnership with Intel. Called BioSport, the $149 headphones include a heart rate monitor with biometric sensors enabling users to also track pace, distance, elevation and calorie burn, the companies said. The BioSport phones are compatible with RunKeeper at launch and additional app support is planned in 2015, they said. Third-party retailers for the headphones include Amazon, Best Buy and Dick’s Sporting Goods.

Linn is offering a Christmas gift to audiophiles, giving away a free, unique 24-bit Studio Master track from its download store every day in December until Christmas Eve. The company will also post a new video each day with the story behind every song, it said. Typical prices for Linn music downloads are $12.50 for a 320k MP3 and $18 for a 24-bit FLAC file.

DTS announced an iOS app from Deepak Chopra and Above Technologies that’s encoded with DTS Headphone:X technology. Within the app, called The Non Local, Chopra narrates poems inspired by "Healing the Heart" meditations by 13th century Persian mystic Rumi. The app is designed to help users “calm down, reduce stress, normalize your blood pressure and sleep better by listening to sound in a holistic manner," said Chopra, an alternative medicine advocate, saying he chose the DTS technology for its “immersive sound.” An Android version will be available in December, DTS said Friday. A DTS spokesman told us roughly 10 apps integrate Headphone:X. Hardware products incorporating the technology include the Turtle Beach Ear Force i60 headphones and Turtle Beach Ear Force Z60 PC headset. The Vivo Xplay 3S smartphone, from China, integrates DTS Headphone:X, too, he said.

Sennheiser will open two temporary pop-up concept stores -- one each in New York and San Francisco -- to raise consumer awareness during the holiday selling season on "the benefits of premium sound and the Sennheiser brand," the company said. The "experiential" stores will be open Nov. 22 through Dec. 28, Sennheiser said. The New York store will be at 11 Kenmare St. on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and the San Francisco store will be at 2277 Mission St. in the city’s Mission District, it said Thursday. Sennheiser wants the stores to be "urban hubs, allowing visitors to hang out and enjoy the pleasures of excellent sound," it said. Gray acoustic panels will cover the walls of both stores to "reduce outside noise and create a sonic cocoon, a temporary escape from the Christmas shopping hustle," it said.

U.K. high-end audio company Arcam moved into the soundbar market with the Solo, touting it as "one of very few soundbars that is compatible with 4K video sources," such as a Netflix set-top, said the company’s website. "It’s not your usual soundbar," said Arcam Managing Director Charlie Brennan at a recent London briefing. "While convenient, most soundbars offer a fairly poor audio performance for TV and are dreadful on music." The 100-watt Solo, which costs about $1,300, mounts on a wall or sits on a shelf and has HD audio decoding for Dolby True-HD and DTS-HD, Arcam said. Six drivers are arrayed in a stereo pair, with the high-frequency drivers angled outward to better spread the image, it said. Apt-X Bluetooth takes in audio from mobile devices and transmits audio to Bluetooth-enabled headphones, it said. Arcam offers free control apps for Android and iOS devices. Solo has five HDMI connectors (four input and one output) with 4K passthrough. Solo also typifies a new trend in soundbar convenience, letting a user control both the TV and soundbar with the TV’s remote. Control through a single remote was first offered with the Canton DM 50 TV soundbase from Germany. The Canton unit connects to the TV by optical cable and incorporates chips that learn the remote codes for key audio functions, such as volume control and mute, from the TV’s remote. The Canton’s volume and muting is thereafter controlled by the TV remote. Arcam’s Solo achieves the same result without the need to build a learn function into the soundbar. It does this by exploiting the Audio Return Channel (ARC) option provided by HDMI standards since Version. 1.4 in 2009. When Solo is connected by HDMI cable to an HDMI socket on a TV that’s ARC-enabled, the single remote control for the TV controls the audio functions of the soundbar, such as volume and mute. For this to work, the TV must have at least one ARC-enabled HDMI socket. As for the Solo’s 4K passthrough capability, all its HDMI connectors are HDMI 1.4, rather than the new HDMI 2.0. Arcam uses a similar approach to that adopted by Sony to upgrade Ultra HD TVs with HDMI 1.4 connectors to handle 4K video at the higher frames of HDMI 2.0. Solo handles 4K signals at frame rates up to 30 Hz with professional 4:4:4 color space, while 4K signals at 60 Hz are handled with the consumer 4:2:0 color space. "All the bars we know of with HDMI that pass 4K only pass 4K video at 30 Hz at 4:4:4 color space," said an Arcam spokesman. "We also handle 4K up to 60 Hz at 4:2:0 color space. We are unaware of any other product that does this." Solo also can accommodate digital audio via digital optical cable or analog stereo cable, where an HDMI connection is not available, Arcam said.

Southwest Airlines began offering music service from Beats Music on the airline’s Wi-Fi-enabled aircraft. Passengers can access “hundreds” of playlists via the Southwest entertainment portal and have a playlist customized to their tastes by answering questions about location, activity, surroundings and musical preference, the airline said Monday. The service will be compatible with major mobile devices and operating systems, including iOS and Android, as well as most Web browsers, Southwest said.

Clarification: Tidal Music, the lossless streaming service that launched Tuesday as the U.S. and U.K. versions of WiMP (see 1410280037), calls itself a “high-fidelity” and "high-quality" music streaming service, not a high-resolution audio service. Though industry pundits have commonly referred to lossless-music streaming services like Tidal generically as "high-resolution" (see 1403260064), the specs for Tidal posted in a video at the Tidal website are below those of the formal industry definition for High-Resolution Audio announced in June (see 1406130065).

Sennheiser wants microphone owners and customers to write to the FCC in support of the company’s petition seeking reconsideration of the FCC’s incentive auction report and order on wireless mics (see 1409160061), the company said Wednesday. "The FCC has an enormously difficult task to repurpose spectrum from traditional over-the-air TV broadcast to mobile broadband services -- this is a matter of content distribution," said Joe Ciaudelli, who works on spectrum issues for Sennheiser. "However, spectrum is crucial for content creation as well. It is essential that productions have access to reliable prime spectrum for their most critical wireless links.” The wireless mic company filed the petition in docket 12-268 at the FCC last month.

Swedish high-resolution music service WiMP HiFi launched Tuesday in the U.S. and the U.K. as Tidal Music. In an email, the company offered customers who had expressed interest in the service prior to availability a free 30-day VIP trial of the premium service, after which the monthly subscription fee of $19.95 would kick in. Non-VIP new subscribers can sign up for a seven-day free trial, according to the email. The service initially will be available via web browser through Google Chrome only. A customer support representative told us the company is working on availability on other browsers. Tidal Music expects to be available on Sonos and Bluesound networked music systems “hopefully within a week or two,” he said, along with Auralic, Bluesound, Denon, Harman Omni, HEOS, Meridian, NAD and Sonos, among others. High-res files are available in the ALAC (Apple Lossless) format, according to the company website. The music streaming service claims a music library of 25 million tracks in lossless audio.

Loudspeaker-maker Artison, founded by Infinity Systems designer Cary Christie, turned to Kickstarter to crowdfund the company’s RCC Nano 1 stand-alone subwoofer. Christie said he opted for the Kickstarter campaign to get audio fans “involved in the development of this important new subwoofer.” Contributors to the Kickstarter campaign can buy the sub for as low as $399, a 60 percent discount, Christie said. The 300-watt Nano measures 7.5 x 8 x 9 inches and has a rigid aluminum enclosure. Artison plans to ship the Nano 1 to early Kickstarter contributors in January and to late supporters in March. It will be available to the public in January at a minimum advertised price of $899, but Kickstarter supporters will receive varying discounts depending on their level of participation, the company said. As of Friday, the campaign had raised $7,084 of a target $250,000 from 17 backers with 38 days to go.