East London's answer to Sonos wants to control your lights as well as your music

East London's answer to Sonos wants to control your lights as well as your music
Musaical Youth

Musaic, billed as Shoreditch's answer to Sonos, has come up with a wireless multi-room music system with a twist.

As well as letting you play the same or different music in various rooms around the house controlled from your phone, the Musaic system can let you control your lighting wirelessly as well (although only through partnerships with companies like LightwaveRF).

So after dinner and a bottle of red, you could stick on some sultry tunes and dim the lights in one smooth move.

That might sound like a bit of a random USP but with the Internet of Things becoming more and more of a 'thing', we wouldn't be surprised to see more of these kind of hook-ups in the near future.

Speaker set

The Musaic products, which are heading towards the final stages of funding by hitting Kickstarter, use Qualcomm's AllJoyn tech and can also communicate with compatible products from LG and Panasonic.

There are two speakers in the line-up: the smaller Musaic MP5 and the larger Musaic MP10. They stream music from your smartphone, tablet or computer using Wi-Fi and use a fully digital signal path so music isn't compressed, so it should sound pretty sweet.

The speakers also come with a charging stand for your devices to avoid running out of juice as you listen.

The catch is that you can't buy the Musaic products just yet: while the products have been protoyped and tested, the company needs to raise £60,000 on Kickstarter to actually go into production.

You can pledge to support the company and nab a first-run device at special prices - the cheapest option is a single MP5 at £160 ($282), whereas £430/$714 gets you a whole system (one of each speaker).

News Editor (UK)

Former UK News Editor for TechRadar, it was a perpetual challenge among the TechRadar staff to send Kate (Twitter, Google+) a link to something interesting on the internet that she hasn't already seen. As TechRadar's News Editor (UK), she was constantly on the hunt for top news and intriguing stories to feed your gadget lust. Kate now enjoys life as a renowned music critic – her words can be found in the i Paper, Guardian, GQ, Metro, Evening Standard and Time Out, and she's also the author of 'Amy Winehouse', a biography of the soul star.