Valve is still determined to release its living room PC game console, called the Steam Machine, despite skyrocketing prices for gaming hardware across the board, including the company’s own Steam Deck. June was considered one of the most likely times for Valve to release its home console, but while there is no specific release date yet, Valve did offer an update on when it will launch the Steam Machine. 

The Steam Machine is set to release sometime this summer, according to a blog post by Valve on Thursday. It will come out alongside the Steam Frame, Valve’s VR headset, which was revealed along with the Steam Machine and new Steam Controller last November. 

The Steam Machine is Valve’s gaming PC, built into a roughly 6-inch cube that’s designed to connect to a living room TV. The aim is to deliver a simplified PC gaming experience for a broad audience and for game developers to optimize for a single spec as they’ve done with the Steam Deck. While the Steam Machine’s hardware is expected to be slightly more powerful than the standard PS5 or Xbox Series X, the company doesn’t see the Steam Machine as a direct competitor to those consoles. Pricing has yet to be confirmed, but with the ongoing shortage of PC memory, the price will not be easy on gamers’ wallets. 

Here’s everything we know about the Steam Machine.

When does the Steam Machine come out? 

Valve said Thursday that the Steam Machine will have a summer release date. When the hardware was first revealed, the company said it would be coming in early 2026. On Feb. 4, Valve confirmed the PC would be delayed in its first major update about the Steam Machine since it was unveiled.

This year is turning out to be quite a tumultuous time for gaming. It’s been almost six years since the release of the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles, which is usually the time when those companies would begin teasing their new hardware. However, due to the memory shortage, those companies have instead been forced to increase the prices of their respective consoles and will likely hold off big news about their next-generation hardware until memory prices come down. Game developers are also petrified of releasing anything in November or else get caught up in the whirlwind of hype that is Grand Theft Auto 6, set to release on Nov. 19. If there’s an ideal time for Valve to release its new console, it will be mid-August as a buffer from September, which is getting flooded with game releases. 

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Can I preorder the Steam Machine?

There are no preorders available for the Steam Machine yet. When preorders become available, they will likely be available on the Steam Machine hardware page. 

If Valve does do preorders, the company may have a system in place to roll out consoles in a timely manner, as it did with the Steam Deck. With the Steam Deck, you could preorder the device, and based on when an order was submitted, you would get a designated timeframe for its release and when you’d receive it. 

Valve also required anyone who wanted to preorder the Steam Deck to have a Steam account. This would prevent scalpers from ordering numerous devices at once, which will likely be the case with the Steam Machine. 

Watch this: Valve’s Steam Controller Gets Some Major Design Changes

08:07

How much will the Steam Machine cost? 

This is arguably the biggest question about the Steam Machine, and for good reason. Valve said the console would be priced in the same range as a gaming PC with the same kind of power. There has been speculation that this would put the price at around $600 to $800. 

However, the global RAM shortage continues to raise the price of memory. This could mean the Steam Machine may cost $1,000 or more, which would be a hard sell for many and make it less competitive against the PlayStation 5 or a regular gaming PC. 

Valve said on Feb. 4 that it’s still trying to figure out the price of the Steam Machine.

“The limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing (especially around Steam Machine and Steam Frame),” the company said.

What are the Steam Machine specs? 

Valve has released the specs for the Steam Machine, but on the hardware page, there is a note at the bottom stating, “some specifications subject to change ahead of availability.” It’s not common to see that kind of disclaimer, which hints that if tariffs or  RAM shortages make the console too expensive, Valve may make adjustments to keep the price attractive. 

What else is unique to the Steam Machine? 

Valve is doing a bit more than just making a tiny gaming PC. The company is offering some features that aren’t found on the PS5, Switch 2 or Xbox Series consoles. 

To start, there are removable face plates for the Steam Machine. This is similar to the faceplates for the Xbox 360, which offer a bit of customization for the console. 

Steam Machines are upgradable. You can increase storage by adding a microSD card to the console’s microSD card slot or by replacing the solid-state drive. There is also the possibility to upgrade the RAM, but that will take a few more steps versus the storage swapping. 

The Steam Machine will also be just a computer when needed. Connect it to a monitor with a mouse and keyboard, and the console will act just like a Linux desktop. There’s also the option to install Windows in lieu of SteamOS, which would make it still play PC games, although the experience won’t be as smooth as SteamOS.

The Steam Controller for the Steam Machine will connect seamlessly to the console. And, for multiplayer games, four controllers can connect with a console very easily.

Wait, didn’t Valve already have Steam Machines?

Kind of. Back in 2013, Valve revealed a new operating system called SteamOS. It’s what powers the Steam Deck and creates the Big Picture Mode, which allows gamers to play their PC games in a mostly console-like experience instead of the typical desktop experience of using a mouse to double-click a game to start. 

Along with the operating system, Valve also released its Steam Machine platform. This allowed computer hardware makers to develop computers shaped more like a home console instead of a desktop. Alienware and Dell were some of the notable companies that developed their own Steam Machines, but none of them really caught on, partly due to many games not being compatible with the Linux-based SteamOS. 

The Steam Machines fizzled out in the mid-2010s as making games compatible with SteamOS was not a priority for game developers at the time. It wasn’t until 2018 that Valve developed Proton, a compatibility layer for SteamOS to make it easier to run most Windows games. Proton currently supports more than 20,000 Windows games. 

Valve also ended up offering an alternative to getting a whole new piece of hardware. In 2015, the company released Steam Link, a device that allowed PC games to be streamed directly to a TV. 

The Windows version of the Hola Browser has been compromised in a supply chain attack that delivered an undeclared executable identified by researchers as a cryptocurrency miner.

The compromise was uncovered during periodic certification checks on Hola Browser as part of its AppEsteem certification testing procedure, which it had previously passed.

Hola is an Israeli company best known for Hola VPN, a service that allows users to route internet traffic through other users’ devices or through paid proxy infrastructure to bypass geographic restrictions and access content from different countries.

Hola Browser is based on Chromium and integrates VPN and proxy functionality directly into the browser.

The company and its products have attracted controversy in the past due to opaque traffic-handling practices related to the operation of a commercial service called Luminati Networks, which turned free users into proxies.

In the latest app integrity checks, Sophos and other cybersecurity companies involved in the evaluation process discovered an undeclared executable named ‘me.exe’ being installed in some cases under C:\Program Files\Hola\.

The file had not been certified, had no timestamp, wasn’t digitally signed, contained obfuscated code, and could write to memory.

On closer examination, Sophos found signs that the binary was a Monero cryptocurrency miner, including strings pointing to its true nature.

The miner adds a Windows Defender exclusion rule, copies itself to Program Files as ‘HolaMonitorService.exe,’ creates an auto-starting Windows service named ‘hola_monitor_svc,’ and runs when the computer is idle.

Holas’s response

Hola was informed of the findings by AppEsteem and confirmed that they had suffered a supply chain compromise, which was also independently detected by cybersecurity firm Sygnia.

Despite that, the software vendor says that only about 0.1% of its users were affected, and there’s no evidence of user data access, theft, or compromise.

“We have since completely rebuilt our distribution pipeline, implemented advanced code-signing verification, and introduced tighter access controls and continuous monitoring across our infrastructure,” assured Hola’s CEO, Avi Raz Cohen.

“These measures are designed to ensure that only declared, certified, and signed components are ever delivered to our users.”

BleepingComputer has contacted Hola to request more information about how the breach occurred, who the perpetrators are, and whether clients on other platforms were also affected, but we have not heard back as of this publishing.

Security teams log 54% of successful attacks and alert on just 14%. The rest move through your environment unseen.

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Have you ever had the desire to see Sam Altman and Palmer Luckey square off over a moderately suspenseful card game? If so, you are in luck.

Silicon Valley’s leaders are rushing to embrace the power of media for the purposes of marketing and political capital. Now, in a sign of the times, Founders Fund, the venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, has launched its own game show.

“MAFIA the GAME,” will apparently be an ongoing thing, where prominent tech luminaries get together and face off over a game of cards (the show is named after the party-game favorite).

The spectacle is moderated by Pirate Wires editor Mike Solana (who is also the chief marketing officer at Founders Fund). The debut episode includes a who’s who of players — Sam Altman; Palmer Luckey; Bryan Johnson, the famed biohacker who will (according to him) live forever; and Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of encrypted chat app Signal.

“I’m so f*cking bored with VC content,” Solana told Newcomer, which originally reported the show’s existence. “There has to be a more interesting way to get to know someone, and I think that this is a way more interesting way to get to know someone.”

TechCrunch reached out to Founders Fund for more information on the program.

In many ways, having a reality-TV-esque platform is just good business these days. The internet has turned the world into a population of chronic media consumers, and the average American spends around 2.5 hours on social media per day. Much of that time is spent scrolling through an endless flood of advertising-laced memes and videos.

In the modern era, the road to power and influence is paved with infotainment.

Companies and executives have sought to take advantage of this new reality in different ways. OpenAI recently raised some eyebrows when it procured TBPN, the buzzy founder-led podcast. Meanwhile, a number of tech’s most prominent players have leveraged virality to their advantage. Johnson, for instance, has managed to grow his following through a very active (and quite bizarre) social media presence. Elon Musk, meanwhile, has also managed to leverage his public persona to go viral (although arguments could be made that his online presence has sometimes hurt rather than helped his businesses).

This trend has also spread to the startup space, where people like Cluely CEO Chungin “Roy” Lee have demonstrated the power of being a one-man viral hype machine.

from the low-tech-beats-hi-tech dept

Flock Safety doesn’t seem to care about anyone. Not its customers, not those captured by its cameras, not even the legislators trying to find a balance between safety and privacy.

Flock started out by pitching its cameras — with built-in license plate readers — to the kind of people with money to blow on unproven tech and the willingness to use it to keep unwanted people (read: not white) out of their neighborhoods. It soon expanded past the gated community market, courting cops who wanted to use the tech to track unwanted people (read: not white) who might be driving around in cars and existing.

As always, both parties (Flock/cops) claimed the tech was essential to capturing the “worst of the worst” — auto thieves, wanted felons, sex offenders, etc. And, as always, real-world use cases were more along the lines of oh, you know, tracking down women seeking abortion options or letting cops keep tabs on their ex-wives.

The problem with Flock isn’t necessarily unique to Flock. It’s a problem almost every third-party contractor creates. When thing go poorly (and they have gone very poorly for Flock recently), no one seems to know who’s responsible for removing the unwanted tech, much less who actually has the authority to shut a surveillance system down.

This has created a problem that has no immediate solution. When Dayton, Ohio shut down its Flock cameras, it had no idea whether contract termination meant the cameras were actually shut off. Worse, law enforcement officials didn’t seem to know either. A fix was needed, and Dayton found a cost-effective way of keeping Flock from operating the unwanted cameras until when (or if!) it decided to roll into town to remove them.

Jason Koebler has the details for 404 Media:

The city of Dayton, Ohio has covered its Flock automated license plate reader cameras with black trash bags in part because police there are unsure whether the cameras are still active and the city also doesn’t seem to know whether it is allowed to take the cameras down. The move comes after months of resident outrage, a scandal in which the city was sharing Flock camera data for immigration enforcement apparently on accident, and a $30,000 audit into how the cameras are being used.

You can see the problem. While the city may have terminated the contract and the PD stating it won’t use the cameras, there’s no real “OFF” switch on the end user side. Because the cameras aren’t truly owned by the city, it has to wait around for Flock to come get its boys. And even though the Dayton PD’s access portal may be dead because it’s parted ways with Flock, that doesn’t mean hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the US don’t have access to the cameras the city has determined can’t be used.

This isn’t speculation. This is something that has already been observed by other municipalities.

Cities are not sure what their contracts state how to extricate themselves from those contracts, or whether the cameras are recording (and where that data is going). This uncertainty highlights the problems associated with using private, third-party surveillance infrastructure. Last week, for example, the mayor of Menominee, Wisconsin said that Flock cameras in the city “have been activated without city council approval.”  

That’s some shady shit right there. But it’s not even the shadiest thing Flock has done in terms of (1) supposedly deactivated cameras and (2) garbage bag-covered cameras. Late last year, the city of Evanston, Illinois covered Flock cameras in garbage bags until Flock came to remove them. Then this happened:

The city previously ordered Flock to shut down 19 cameras (18 stationary and one flex camera that can be attached to a squad car) provided by the company and put its contract with Flock on a 30-day termination notice on Aug. 26. The company took down 15 of the 18 stationary cameras by Sept. 8, only to reinstall all of them by Tuesday. This was apparently without authorization from city officials, who sent Flock a cease-and-desist order to take them back down.

What the actual fuck? And yeah, one might be inclined to chalk this up to a simple misunderstanding, but only if one isn’t familiar with Flock’s general disregard for municipal laws:

Company communications with state transportation agencies obtained via public records requests, and interviews with more than half a dozen former employees, suggest that in its rush to install surveillance cameras in the absence of clear regulatory frameworks, Flock repeatedly broke the law in at least five states.

One state in particular seemed to be hit particularly hard by Flock’s lawless expansion efforts:

In South Carolina, State Transportation Secretary Christy Hall told Forbes that since spring 2022, her staff has found more than 200 unpermitted Flock cameras during routine monitoring of public roads.

Hence the garbage bags. It appears Flock is willing to activate cameras it’s been instructed to deactivate. And that’s when it’s not installing cameras illegally or thumbing its nose at removal orders by reinstalling cameras it has just removed.

Private companies who pull this sort of shit would be shut down, if not banned, by cities if it involved anything other than cop tech. Somehow, Flock manages to ride this out by claiming to be a cop’s best friend, even as its pretending local laws and regulations don’t apply to it.

I would encourage cities looking to rid themselves of Flock cameras to go one step further: just pry them off the poles and toss them in the nearest dumpster. If Flock wants to retrieve its equipment, it can be directed to the nearest landfill. Or, if cities don’t feel comfortable doing this themselves, they can always host a few foreign exchange students to help ensure Flock cameras remain inoperable until removal.

Filed Under: alpr, law enforcement, mass surveillance, privacy, surveillance, surveillance abuse, tracking

Companies: flock, flock safety

IT Search’s Rebecca Lavery discusses the software ecosystem in Ireland and offers advice to professionals considering their next career move.

For Rebecca Lavery, a principal recruitment consultant at IT Search, which is a member of the Vertical Markets Group, Ireland’s software development market has experienced significant change since the global pandemic.

She explained to SiliconRepublic.com that an initial boom in 2021 and 2022 resulted in a surge of software roles and movement across the sector, before decreasing significantly across the market in 2023. 

She said, “Today, role volumes sit at roughly 40pc of pre-pandemic levels. What makes the current picture particularly striking is where the demand is concentrated. Hiring is happening predominantly at senior level and above.”

As a result, she finds that more junior roles – that is, jobs typically undertaken by graduates, early-career starters or less experienced professionals, as a means of beginning their career journeys – are less common in the current ecosystem.

“Junior and mid-level roles have largely dried up, widely attributed to the growing adoption of AI, which is automating tasks that would previously have been entry-level work,” Lavery said. “Employers now want people who can oversee, review and critique what AI produces, rather than those learning the fundamentals themselves.

“This creates a problem that the industry hasn’t seen the full effects of just yet. Several of our clients have raised the same concern – if companies aren’t hiring and training juniors today, where will tomorrow’s senior engineers come from?”

Mixed market demand

As a direct result of widespread redundancies experienced by professionals in the space over the course of the last few years, Lavery finds that the issue of reduced opportunities is compounded significantly by a rise in the number of people seeking employment. 

Last December, workplace social media platform LinkedIn published data highlighting the growing competition professionals are facing as they attempt to secure new employment, leading to a rise in ‘job hugging’, which is a commitment to staying in one’s current role.

This is typically due to wider issues, fears and concerns regarding the broader employment environment. 

Lavery said, “The result is a tricky mix – fewer roles, more candidates and one of the most competitive hiring markets we’ve seen. Salary growth has stalled as a result, as companies no longer need to pay a premium for in-demand skillsets when they have an abundance of options.”

This was also evident in a recently published report from the Employment and Recruitment Federation and Icon Accounting, the Irish Labour Market Annual Survey. The research suggested that we are seeing a landscape in which organisations are still actively recruiting, but with a far more defensive mindset as they navigate the pressures of rising costs, uncertainty and talent constraints. 

Previously commenting on the annual report, David Shanahan, a director at IT Search, explained that there are some “important nuances” to make note of. He said that in certain areas, such as data and cybersecurity, hiring is heavily contract-focused. However, across AI, software engineering and DevOps, hiring is more evenly split than it might appear.

Shanahan said, “Contract roles are largely tied to project and programme delivery, while permanent hiring is driven by product-led and commercial software companies, where the focus is on building and scaling their own technology platforms.”

Future needs

Ultimately, according to Lavery, it is “very tricky for juniors to break into the industry” at the moment, adding that the “the only advice I would have is to keep trying and keep your skills up along the way, through courses and personal projects that you could showcase in an interview”.

With education and upskilling in mind, today (4 June), the Irish Universities Association (IUA), the Higher Education Authority and the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science confirmed the return of the Microcredential Learner Fee Subsidy. 

Designed to support lifelong learning and create opportunities for students, the subsidy will support participation in 57 microcredential courses offered by IUA universities in 2026, spanning areas of national importance such as digital transformation, artificial intelligence, sustainability, leadership, innovation, healthcare, engineering and business development. 

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Audio-Technica has introduced the AT-MCD1 Dual Moving Coil Stereo Cartridge, a new flagship moving coil cartridge that the company is calling the finest phono cartridge it has ever produced. At $11,000, it should be. That kind of money buys a lot of records — even in 2026, when some Discogs sellers think a clean Blue Note reissue requires a notarized letter from your banker. Or your mother, depending on whether your weekly social calendar still consists of walking to the local record store, correcting strangers about deadwax, and pretending that $175 for a reissue with “light sleeve scuffing” is perfectly normal adult behavior.

The AT-MCD1 is not another affordable cartridge aimed at entry-level turntables, and that distinction matters. Audio-Technica may be one of the most important brands in affordable vinyl playback, but the Japanese manufacturer has never been only that. The company began in 1962 as a cartridge manufacturer, and its upper-tier analog products have been pushing well beyond the “starter table” aisle for years. The $2,900 AT-ART20 and the $9,999 Hotaru turntable already made that clear. The AT-MCD1 just removes any remaining doubt with a very sharp diamond chisel.

AT-MCD1: Audio-Technica’s Most Ambitious Moving Coil Cartridge Yet

The headline feature is the AT-MCD1’s unified diamond stylus and cantilever. Rather than bonding a diamond tip to a separate cantilever, Audio-Technica forms both from a single lab-grown diamond. That matters because the stylus and cantilever are the first mechanical link in the playback chain. Any added joint, adhesive, mass, or material transition can affect how groove information is transmitted before it ever reaches the generator.

Audio-Technica says the AT-MCD1’s 0.22 mm-square cantilever is produced using a CVD, or chemical vapor deposition, process for precision and consistency. The cartridge also uses a newly developed Shibata stylus with a smaller minor radius than previous shapes, specified at r2.7 x R0.08. The goal is more accurate groove tracing and more direct transmission of extremely small mechanical vibrations.

That is the engineering story here. A cartridge lives or dies by how accurately it turns motion into signal, and Audio-Technica is betting that a seamless lab-grown diamond stylus/cantilever structure gives the AT-MCD1 a cleaner path from groove wall to coil.

The AT-MCD1 uses Audio-Technica’s dual moving coil architecture, a design long associated with the brand’s better MC cartridges. The company says the layout is intended to improve channel separation and preserve wide frequency response. PCOCC copper coils and a powerful magnetic circuit are used to increase signal transfer efficiency and output voltage.

The body construction is also far from basic. Audio-Technica uses a multilayer structure consisting of an aluminum base, titanium housing, and elastomer undercover. That combination is designed to control unwanted resonance without turning the cartridge into a dead little brick. Cartridge bodies are not decorative real estate; they shape how energy is managed after the stylus enters the groove. Get that wrong and your $11,000 cartridge becomes a very small, very expensive lie detector.

AT-MCD1 Specifications

The AT-MCD1 is a low-output moving coil cartridge, but its 0.55 mV output is relatively healthy for the category and should make matching with high-quality MC phono stages less punishing than some ultra-low-output designs. Audio-Technica specifies a recommended load impedance of 100 ohms or higher, which gives users some flexibility depending on the phono stage, system balance, and desired tonal presentation.

The 20 Hz to 50,000 Hz frequency response is wider than any record collection actually needs on paper, but it does suggest that Audio-Technica is chasing bandwidth, speed, and low mechanical loss rather than a warm, syrupy presentation designed to flatter tired pressings. Channel separation is rated at 28 dB at 1 kHz, with output balance held to 0.5 dB, both of which point to careful generator alignment and channel consistency.

The stylus assembly is the real story. The AT-MCD1 uses an integrated Shibata stylus and 0.22 mm square diamond cantilever, formed as a unified structure rather than a separate stylus bonded to another cantilever material. That should reduce mechanical loss at the point where groove movement becomes signal — which is exactly where an $11,000 cartridge has to prove it is more than expensive jewelry for men with record clamps.

Tracking force is specified from 1.7 to 1.9 grams, with 1.8 grams as the standard setting. The vertical tracking angle is 20 degrees, and the 9.5-gram cartridge weight should make the AT-MCD1 compatible with a wide range of serious tonearms, though final matching will still depend on effective mass and the arm’s ability to handle the cartridge’s compliance and energy behavior.

The published dynamic compliance is 15 × 10⁻⁶ cm/dyne at 100 Hz, which is typical of Japanese cartridge specifications. Users comparing it with Western cartridge compliance figures should remember that 100 Hz compliance does not translate directly to the more commonly referenced 10 Hz figure. In plain English: do the tonearm math before bolting this thing onto whatever arm happens to be sitting on your plinth.

Key Specifications

• Type: Dual moving coil stereo cartridge
• Frequency response: 20 Hz to 50,000 Hz
• Output voltage: 0.55 mV at 1 kHz, 5 cm/sec
• Channel separation: 28 dB at 1 kHz
• Output balance: 0.5 dB at 1 kHz
• Recommended load impedance: 100 ohms or higher with head amplifier connected
• Coil impedance: 12 ohms at 1 kHz
• DC resistance: 12 ohms
• Coil inductance: 25 μH at 1 kHz
• Stylus shape: Shibata, integrated cantilever type
• Stylus curvature radius: 2.7 × 0.08 mil
• Cantilever: 0.22 mm square diamond
• Vertical tracking angle: 20 degrees
• Tracking force: 1.7 to 1.9 grams; 1.8 grams standard
• Static compliance: 21 × 10⁻⁶ cm/dyne
• Dynamic compliance: 15 × 10⁻⁶ cm/dyne at 100 Hz
• Threaded holes: M2.6 × 2
• Dimensions: 17.3 mm × 17.7 mm × 26.7 mm
• Weight: 9.5 grams
• Included accessories: Non-magnetic screwdriver, brush, washers, M2.6 cartridge installation screws, protector, and wooden case

Audio-Technica Is Not Just the Budget Cartridge Brand

A lot of listeners know Audio-Technica through affordable MM cartridges and turntables, and that is fair. The company has helped more people get into vinyl playback than most high-end brands would ever admit in public.

But that is not the whole story.

The AT-ART20, introduced at $2,900, already placed Audio-Technica in direct conversation with premium MC cartridge makers such as Lyra, Hana, and Koetsu. That cartridge used a titanium and aluminum body structure, an elastomer undercover, dual moving coils, and a nude special line-contact stylus with a solid boron cantilever. It was not a budget cartridge wearing a nicer suit.

Then came the Hotaru, a $9,999 floating turntable with a levitating platter, built-in lighting system, and limited production run. The Hotaru was strange, expensive, and very Audio-Technica in the sense that it mixed engineering ambition with a concept that felt like it wandered in from a Ridley Scott prop department.

The AT-MCD1 is different. It is more focused. No light show. No floating platter. No “look at me” industrial design circus. Just a flagship moving coil cartridge built around a unified diamond stylus/cantilever and a very high price.

The Bottom Line

The Audio-Technica AT-MCD1 Dual Moving Coil Stereo Cartridge will be available June 4, 2026, through selected specialist retailers for $11,000.

At that price, the AT-MCD1 is not competing with the company’s mainstream VM cartridges or even most of its ART Series lineup. It is aimed at owners of reference-level turntables, tonearms, phono stages, and record collections where the cartridge is expected to retrieve more information from the grooves and, ideally, make you see G-d. Or Elvis. Depends on the pressing, the system, and how much cocaine you had before cueing up side two.

The open question is whether the AT-MCD1 can justify the leap from Audio-Technica’s already strong high-end cartridges into true statement territory. The unified diamond stylus/cantilever is technically significant. The body construction looks purposeful. The dual moving coil architecture has deep Audio-Technica roots.

Now it has to play records better than anything the company has made before.

For $11,000, it had better.

Price & Availability

The Audio-Technica AT-MCD1 Dual Moving Coil Stereo Cartridge will be available June 4, 2026, through selected specialist retailers for $11,000.

For more information: audio-technica.com

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Dan Clark Audio is using High End Vienna 2026 to introduce AEON CORE, a new $899 closed-back planar magnetic headphone that replaces the AEON 2 and moves the company’s most accessible audiophile platform in a different direction.

The headline is not just the new aluminum-and-wood design, although that is clearly part of the pitch. AEON CORE introduces an all-new planar magnetic driver engineered for higher efficiency, with a 17-ohm impedance and approximately 97 dB/mW sensitivity. That matters because older Dan Clark Audio planars have not always been the easiest headphones to wake up with modest portable sources. AEON CORE is being positioned as a planar headphone that can run cleanly from a wider range of gear, including portable DAC/amps and better dongles, without demanding a desktop amplifier the size of a lunch tray.

The tuning story is just as important. AEON CORE is Dan Clark Audio’s first headphone tuned to a revised Harman over-ear target developed through research with Dr. Sean Olive. That does not mean it will sound identical to NOIRE X or every other Harman-leaning headphone with a measurement graph. Dan Clark says AEON CORE has slightly less energy in the 100Hz to 225Hz region than the company usually delivers, which should give the bass a different texture: potentially less midbass warmth, more separation, and a cleaner transition into the lower midrange.

At 328 grams, AEON CORE stays true to one of the best things about the AEON line: long-session comfort without turning your neck into a structural engineering project. Distortion is specified at less than 0.1% referenced to 80 dB white noise, which is the kind of number planar fans like to see because low distortion has always been one of the technology’s calling cards.

AEON CORE is priced at $899 and is expected to begin shipping on June 14. That puts it below the NOIRE X and directly in the zone where Dan Clark Audio has historically done some of its most compelling work: closed-back planar magnetic headphones that are portable, comfortable, technically ambitious, and not priced out of reach.

The Bottom Line

The Dan Clark Audio AEON CORE is not just an AEON 2 replacement with nicer clothes. For $899.99, it brings a new closed-back planar driver stack, easier drivability, and tuning based on Dr. Sean Olive’s revised Harman over-ear research.

The key story is efficiency: 97 dB/mW, 17 ohms, and designed to work with amps delivering at least 125mW into 16 ohms. That makes it DCA’s easiest headphone to drive so far, which matters for portable DAC/amps and compact desktop setups.

Its most obvious rivals are the Dan Clark Audio NOIRE X and Audeze LCD-2 Closed-Back, which makes this a very focused fight: efficient, lightweight, comfort-first DCA design versus heavier, more traditional closed-back planar alternatives.

Where to buy: $899 at Headphones.com | Dan Clark Audio

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