Apple’s latest explanation for Siri AI on Apple Watch identifies which models support the feature, but it still doesn’t explain why older watches are excluded despite requiring a nearby Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone.

A June 19 interview with TechRadar offered Apple’s first public response to questions about the cutoff. Apple Watch and Health Product Marketing Manager Cait Dooley said Siri AI and other watchOS 27 features work best on newer hardware.

Apple specifically pointed to Apple Watch Series 9 and later models, Apple Watch Ultra 2 and later models, and Apple Watch SE 3.

WWDC 2026 introduced Siri AI as part of watchOS 27. The feature requires both a supported Apple Watch and a nearby Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone, with support beginning on Apple Watch Series 9.

TechRadar asked Apple why older Apple Watch models don’t qualify. Dooley said Apple makes power and performance a priority with every software release and repeated that Siri AI works best on newer hardware.

Her answer clarified the compatibility list, but it stopped short of explaining the technical reason behind the cutoff.

Apple drew a clear compatibility line

Siri AI on watchOS 27 supports the following models.

• Apple Watch SE 3
• Apple Watch Series 9
• Apple Watch Series 10
• Apple Watch Series 11
• Apple Watch Ultra 2
• Apple Watch Ultra 3

Older models don’t make the cut.

• Apple Watch SE 2
• Apple Watch Series 6
• Apple Watch Series 7
• Apple Watch Series 8
• Apple Watch Ultra

Apple Watch Series 8 and the first-generation Apple Watch Ultra use the S8 chip, which includes a 2-core Neural Engine. Apple Watch Series 9 introduced the S9 system-in-package with a 4-core Neural Engine that handles machine learning tasks up to twice as fast as the S8.

Siri AI requires both a supported Apple Watch and a nearby Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone

The newer chip also brought on-device Siri processing and support for the double tap gesture. The hardware gap between supported and unsupported models provides one possible explanation for Apple’s compatibility cutoff.

TechRadar goes further than Apple

After publishing Apple’s comments, TechRadar offered its own interpretation. The publication wrote that “it’s likely only Apple Watches running Apple’s powerful S9 and S10 chips can handle the technical demands of Siri AI.”

Apple didn’t make that claim.

The company’s explanation and TechRadar’s conclusion aren’t the same thing. Apple may have technical reasons for limiting Siri AI to newer watches, likely the on-device Siri processing, but its current public statements don’t identify what those reasons are.

Apple’s own requirements make the Siri AI cutoff harder to evaluate because the feature isn’t being presented as a standalone Apple Watch capability. A paired iPhone does the heavy lifting for computational needs.

Apple Watch owners now have a compatibility list and a broad performance explanation. A technical explanation for why Siri AI begins with the Apple Watch Series 9 generation hasn’t arrived yet.

The Chimelong Spaceship Theme Park in China’s Zhuhai region is a 750-meter-long structure that lies against green hills, like a vessel that just landed and stayed. The world’s largest indoor theme park is contained within its over 400,000-square-meter enclosed area. It began functioning in stages in late 2023 and quickly established seven Guinness World Records before most people outside the region were aware of it.

The structure itself sends a very clear message from the start, with its sleek, rounded form creating a stunning display at night thanks to the blue accent lights and blending in pretty well with the surrounding terrain during the day. The park was created by a Los Angeles company with great experience in huge marine projects at a cost of around $1.1 billion spread over more than ten years. It shares a border with an ocean-themed resort and a huge hotel, forming part of a major destination expected to attract millions of visitors each year.

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However, when you enter, it becomes clear that this place is massive. The park combines a vast aquarium operation with rides, entertainment, and themed attractions spread across around 15 different zones. It’s not just big; it’s also home to over 150,000 marine animals of over 300 species. The total volume of water in all of the tanks is a staggering 75 million litres, setting yet another record. The largest single tank alone holds 56 million litres and incorporates an incredible wave system capable of producing waves as tall as 3.2 metres, gaining the Guinness World Record for the highest indoor artificial wave ever.

One of the most impressive marine attractions is the world’s largest living coral reef exhibit, spread across multiple specially designed tanks with a combined capacity that breaks all kinds of records. Visitors can walk through an environment filled with live coral, stunning fish, and well-lit displays underlining the value of reef ecosystems. There’s even a presentation that uses a giant animatronic coral monster to demonstrate reef importance in an engaging fashion, rather than just a boring lecture.

Rides are scattered throughout the park, mixing together with space themes and undersea excursions. One of the first things you’ll notice is a very gentle introduction to the park, a motion simulator called Spaceship Story in which you sit aboard a vessel that takes off, encounters a few challenges, and then returns, all using screens and movement to immerse you in the park’s story of exploration and discovery from the start.

The clear star of the show is below in the deep-sea section, where Bermuda Storm, the world’s largest seated motion simulator capacity, can accommodate 304 people on a single platform. Riders enter what appears to be a research vessel and face a giant curved projection screen that must be well over 1,600 square meters in size. The entire thing is overlaid with water effects, wind, actual set pieces, and even an animatronic character who interacts with what’s happening on screen. Many tourists believe that this is the ride that will stay with them the most at the park since it involves all of your senses at once and delivers a light and adventurous story that is never too intense.

Next to that is China’s first real underwater submarine experience. Riders enter a vessel that transports them through a genuine aquarium tank, with fish swimming straight past the windows and projections and stage pieces resulting in some very spectacular encounters with larger creatures, such as the gigantic squid scene. The entire journey unfolds at a very peaceful, observant pace, which contrasts perfectly with the high-adrenaline adventure next door.

Enterprise teams keep watching the same thing happen. An AI agent demos beautifully, goes to production, and stalls: it runs for a short stretch, then needs a human to top up its context and check its output, and the promised efficiency drains into supervision. The agent did the work; you did the watching. It’s one reason so many agent pilots never turn into production systems.

The pitch on the other side of that wall is the one every team wants to believe: an agent that runs a long job on its own, overnight if it has to, and leaves a person to validate only the last 10%. Whether that is achievable turns on a problem the orchestration conversation mostly skips. When AI firm Chroma tested 18 leading models, every one lost accuracy as its input grew, a property of how attention works, not a gap a stronger model closes. An agent fed more and more of your business as it runs does not get steadier. It gets shakier.

This is the layer beneath the orchestration race. Routing, durable execution and observability all assume each agent is already competent enough to coordinate in the first place. The deeper question is how long an agent can run before a human has to step in, and that comes down to where your company’s knowledge lives relative to the model. Both standard fixes leave a human in the loop.

Why teaching a model your business keeps you in the loop

Frontier models keep getting more capable, and the gap does not close, because it is not a capability problem. It is about where your knowledge sits relative to the model, and enterprises have had two ways to place it there.

The first is fine-tuning, which bakes knowledge into the weights. It remains subject to catastrophic forgetting, a problem identified in the 1980s and still unresolved in 2026: teaching a model something new tends to erode what it already knew. Teams work around it by isolating each task in its own fine-tuned model or adapter, which produces a sprawling estate of models that raises cost and governance overhead. And a fine-tuned model is a snapshot, stale the day a policy changes, when the expensive, slow retraining cycle starts over.

The second is in-context learning, which skips retraining by placing the relevant policies in the prompt at run time. This is where context rot bites. Retrieval narrows what goes into the prompt, but a retrieval miss looks identical to a confident answer, and both cost and latency climb with every token added.

The two failures rhyme. With fine-tuning, the model can be confidently working from last quarter’s policy. With in-context learning, it can be confidently working from a detail it lost in the middle of a long prompt. Either way the output looks equally assured, so you cannot tell which parts are wrong without checking all of them. That is why the human never gets to leave. Some teams often run both at once, fine-tuning the stable knowledge and retrieving the rest. That softens each failure but removes neither: on any given output you still cannot be sure the model is both current and working from the right context, so you still check it.

A third path: generate the specialist model on demand

A third approach is moving from research into early product. Instead of retraining one model or stuffing its prompt, a generator builds a small, task-specific model on demand from your policies, at inference time. The generator is a hypernetwork: a network whose output is the weights of another network.

The idea was named in 2016; applying it to produce specialist language models from text or documents is recent and active. Sakana AI’s Text-to-LoRA, presented at ICML 2025, generates a model adapter from a plain-language description in a single pass, and a 2026 system called SHINE calls hypernetwork adaptation a promising new frontier, precisely because it sidesteps both the retraining cost of fine-tuning and the context limits of prompting.

The point of generating adapters rather than training and storing them is to collapse a sprawling library of per-task LoRAs into one network that can produce them on demand, including for tasks it has not seen.

The elegant part is how this closes the loop on the problem above: the per-task adapter teams hand-build to dodge catastrophic forgetting is the same object a hypernetwork produces automatically. The model zoo stops being a governance headache and becomes a generated output.

The case for going small underneath all this was put most directly in a 2025 paper by Nvidia researchers: for the narrow, repetitive tasks that fill agent workflows, small models are capable enough and 10 to 30 times cheaper to run than frontier generalists. Nace.AI, a Palo Alto company that raised a $21.5 million seed round in May, is the clearest commercial instance. Its core technology, a generator it calls a MetaModel, produces parameter adaptations for a model at inference time from a company’s policies, pointed at regulated work: audit, compliance, risk assessment. The company says its agents handle the bulk of a workflow while human experts validate the result, a split it markets as 90/10.

How the three approaches compare

Why a hypernetwork-built model raises the autonomy ceiling

A model that is narrow, current and small has a smaller surface on which to be wrong. Fewer errors, confined to a known domain, mean fewer outputs an agent has to escalate to a person, which is the real basis for any high-autonomy claim. It is also where a number like 90/10 comes from: not a dial set in advance, but an outcome of how little the system needs to hand back. Reported autonomy shares are best read as measurements of an architecture, not as settings.

Two design choices decide whether that autonomy is trustworthy or merely fast. The first is grounding: tying every output to its source so a reviewer can verify rather than redo. Research models built for exactly this, such as HalluGuard, label each claim as supported or not and cite the passage they relied on. Nace ships its agents with grounding models and reasoning traces for the same reason. A 10% review only means something if the human can confirm provenance in seconds.

The second is the feedback loop, and it forces a question every buyer should ask: when your experts validate the output, whose model improves, and where does it live? That decides whether the compounding asset belongs to the vendor or to you. Arrangements differ. Nace, for instance, uses an external network of certified experts for some engagements and, for direct enterprise deployments, the customer’s own staff, with the resulting model kept inside the customer’s cloud. Each choice routes the learning, and the ownership, somewhere different.

Where the third path breaks

The approach is still early, and a few questions will decide how far it goes. Calibration is the linchpin: the value rests on the model knowing when it is unsure. And it is genuinely unsettled, recent work generating these adapters found they do not automatically improve calibration over ordinary fine-tuning, with gains appearing only under specific constraints.

The quality of the generated model also depends heavily on the policy data it is built from, which puts a premium on data curation. And scale is the open research frontier, the hypernetworks shown in published work so far have been small. This is where Nace’s own work gets interesting: in our interview, the company said it has scaled its generator well beyond those published sizes and derived a scaling law for how performance grows, results it has begun to share publicly and is now putting through peer review. If it holds up, it would help answer one of the central open questions in the field, and it is the paper worth watching.

Whichever approach wins, the work still ends at a human, and that handoff is its own design problem. When Deloitte Australia delivered a roughly A$440,000 government report, it shipped with fabricated citations and an invented court quote after passing senior review, because the reviewers checked the conclusions, which were sound, and not the provenance, which was not. Controlled research suggests the pattern is general: experts corrected an identical flawed recommendation less often when it was labeled AI-generated.

The EU AI Act’s Article 14 now names this automation bias. The lesson is not about any one vendor: a high autonomy share concentrates human attention into a thin, late slice of the work, so the value of that review depends entirely on whether the human can check provenance fast, which loops back to grounding.

What to build, and what to ask before you buy

The honest takeaway: what holds your agents back is usually not orchestration or model size, but whether the model knows your business well enough to be left alone, and the right fix depends on the job. To automate a long, repetitive, high-volume process end to end, run most of your internal audit overnight and have your own experts check the final slice, a hypernetwork generated model is the approach most likely to do it cheaply and run long enough to matter. For a short task that finishes in a few steps and never needed to run unattended, the gap between this and a well-prompted frontier model shrinks to almost nothing, and is not worth the integration cost.

When a vendor pitches autonomous or specialist agents, four questions cut through it.

1. Where does the business knowledge live: in the weights, the prompt, or generated on demand?

2. What does each output come with, so a reviewer can verify it instead of redoing it?

3. What decides which work gets escalated to a human?

4. And whose model improves from that feedback, and where does it run?

The answers, not the headline ratio, tell you what you are buying.

The hypernetwork approach is the most credible attempt yet at making a small model know a specific business without forgetting it and without re-explaining it on every run. It is also the least proven, and the parts that matter most, calibration and scale, are still in peer review. For the right job, pilot it now. For the wrong one, the integration cost buys you little that a well-prompted frontier model wouldn’t.

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Connections: Sports Edition has some fun categories, though the green group was a stumper for me. If you’re struggling with the puzzle but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times. It doesn’t appear in the NYT Games app, but it does in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can play it for free online.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Big Apple baseball.

Green group hint: Bike race clothing.

Blue group hint: Not the Big 10, but…

Purple group hint: Cowboys wear them.

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: New York Yankees, informally.

Green group: Tour de France jerseys.

Blue group: Locations of Big 12 schools.

Purple group: What “boot” might mean.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is New York Yankees, informally. The four answers are Bronx Bombers, Evil Empire, Pinstripes and Yanks.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is Tour de France jerseys. The four answers are green, polka dot, white and yellow.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is locations of Big 12 schools. The four answers are  Boulder, Fort Worth, Manhattan and Waco.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is what “boot” might mean.  The four answers are cleat, eject, kick and mishandle.

According to TrendForce, a global market research and intelligence firm headquartered in Taipei, Taiwan, TCL CSOT, the display manufacturing arm of tech giant TCL, is aggressively promoting its IJP (Ink Jet Printed) OLED display technology as a means of entering the OLED monitor and notebook panel supply chain. The company’s existing Gen 5.5 IJP OLED production line has already reached volume production and has successfully commercialized OLED display panels for the medical industry, while validation programs for branded monitor and notebook products are currently underway. The company’s progress could potentially challenge the long-standing dominance of Korean panel makers LG Display and Samsung Display in the OLED industry.

TCL purchased the IJP OLED patents and actual manufacturing equipment from Japanese firm JOLED in 2023, after previously investing in that company. TCL CSOT moved the equipment to China in order to build its Gen 5.5 IJP OLED plant which became operational in late 2024.

TrendForce reports that TCL CSOT is initially testing market demand with a 27-inch UHD (Ultra High Definition) IJP OLED monitor produced on its Gen 5.5 line, targeting the professional monitor segment.

According to TrendForce, IJP OLED offers superior power efficiency in high-end business and creator-focused displays when compared with existing QD-OLED and WOLED technologies, making it increasingly attractive to brand vendors. The IJP method of manufacturing OLED screens also offers dramatically lower manufacturing costs, which could allow TCL to undercut its competition and gain market share quickly.

Monitor brands from China, Taiwan, and South Korea are reportedly evaluating IJP OLED panels to use in their computer monitors, and TCL CSOT is expected to begin mass production of IJP OLED monitor panels in the third quarter of 2026.

The OLED monitor panel market is currently dominated by Samsung Display and LG Display. Current costs associated with OLED screen manufacturing compared to the more common LCD-based panels has limited OLED’s penetration within the computer monitor market to approximately 3% in 2026. However, according to TrendForce with TCL CSOT investing heavily in its upcoming Gen 8.6 OLED fabrication plant, TrendForce expects OLED monitor penetration to double to 6.2% of the market by the end of this decade, and continue expanding thereafter.

Meanwhile, according to TrendForce, the manufacture of OLED screens for notebooks/laptops is becoming increasingly diversified. In addition to Samsung Display, TCL CSOT, BOE, and Visionox have all committed resources to Gen 8.6 OLED notebook panel production. As a result, adoption of OLED screens in laptops and notebook computers is expected to accelerate rapidly, with penetration projected to reach 22.4% by 2030.

Inkjet Printing vs. Vacuum Evaporation – Which is Better?

IJP OLED uses large scale inkjet printers with soluble organic materials to print red, green and blue sub-pixels directly onto a substrate or “motherglass.” This promises lower production costs and far less material waste compared to the traditional vacuum evaporation methods used for W-OLED and QD-OLED panel manufacturing. Also, since IJP creates individual red, green and blue subpixels, the process avoids the need for color filters used on W-OLED displays and the need for Quantum Dot layers on QD-OLED displays. But current IJP OLED manufacturing facilities are limited in panel size and the current production IJP panels themselves are limited in overall brightness, which has kept the tech out of the consumer television business… for now.

The wildcard in this whole market is TCL CSOT’s Gen 8.6 OLED plant in Guangzhou, China, which is scheduled to begin production of IJP OLED panels in the third or fourth quarter of 2026. The new plant is expected to have the capability of manufacturing IJP OLED screens in much larger screen sizes than the current Gen 5.5 production line.

While initial production of the new plant will concentrate on smaller IJP OLED screens for the notebook and monitor market, the company could potentially begin churning out consumer TV-sized OLED screens in 65 and 77-inch screen sizes as early as next year (2027). Whether they actually pursue this path will depend on how things go with the smaller screen business and whether they can ramp up production and yield quickly enough to be able to reach competitive pricing on these larger screens after recovering the substantial R&D investment required in order to build the plant.

The Bottom Line

TV enthusiasts (like yours truly) love OLED TV for its perfect black levels and outstanding contrast. But the latest flagship TVs from the major TV brands (except LG) all feature LCD display panels, with improved backlighting units that use Mini LED backlighting or RGB backlighting to create bright bold images with wide color gamut reproduction.

While LG, Samsung and Sony continue to offer OLED TV models, the performance gap between LCD and OLED is definitely closing with each new model year as major manufacturers like Samsung and TCL pour billions of dollars into LCD display research, marketing and manufacturing. And with the inefficiencies inherent in current OLED panel manufacturing, it’s unclear how long the tech will be supported as OLED manufacturing costs remain high relative to LCD TV manufacturing.

The promise of cheaper OLED panels is something that could extend the life of the tech, and allow OLED TVs to compete with LCD TVs, even at budget-friendly price points.

With TCL and Sony entering a joint venture for TV manufacturing called BRAVIA, Inc., which is scheduled to begin its operations in April, 2027, and the new Gen 8.6 IJP OLED plant ramping up wide scale panel production at around the same time, we have to wonder whether things might just work out well for the future of OLED TV tech in general, and Sony/BRAVIA OLED TVs in particular.

BRAVIA 10, anyone?

The full report on TCL CSOT entering the notebook and monitor screen market with its IJP OLED screens is available directly from TrendForce on its Report Page,

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Jean-Marie Reynaud has officially placed the AURALIS at the top of its loudspeaker range, and the new French flagship arrives with a clear message: musical scale does not have to come from a cabinet that looks as though it was designed to store military hardware.

Scheduled to launch in fall 2026 at €18,000 per pair, the AURALIS is the most ambitious loudspeaker yet from the Charente-based manufacturer. It combines a 2.5-way architecture, JMR’s proprietary tuned triangular transmission line, a large 120 mm AST tweeter, hand-wired crossovers, and a cabinet designed to deliver bass authority, tonal accuracy, image stability, and long-term listening satisfaction; this is not a speaker designed to impress for ten minutes in a dealer showroom before the listener starts looking for the exit.

I have some history with the brand, although not nearly as much as I would like.

Back in the 1990s in Toronto, a local hi-fi store in the East End carried Jean-Marie Reynaud loudspeakers, and I was able to spend time with most of the lineup. They were partnered with Audiomat electronics, another French brand with a very different approach to the usual North American power-and-machismo routine, along with some very serious Nottingham Analogue Studio turntables and Benz Micro cartridges.

The JMR speakers were never huge sounding in the conventional sense. They did not try to pin you against the back wall with bass fireworks or make every cymbal strike feel like it had been sharpened by a sommelier with anger-management issues. What they did exceptionally well was inner detail, clarity, tonal finesse, imaging, and treble that had air and delicacy without becoming etched or fatiguing.

They also looked different. Not weird for the sake of weird, which remains one of high-end audio’s more persistent crimes, but unmistakably French in the best possible way: thoughtful, elegant, slightly idiosyncratic, and very much their own thing.

Once I left Canada, JMR drifted off my radar. The brand was never as visible in the United States as Focal, Bowers & Wilkins, KEF, or Sonus faber, and that was probably America’s loss. But JMR is still here, still building loudspeakers in France, and AURALIS looks like the company’s most serious statement yet.

The French, for all of their gifts, have never been overly concerned with explaining themselves to everyone else. AURALIS feels very much in that spirit, and I would encourage U.S. and Canadian listeners to seek out a JMR dealer and hear these for themselves. This is a brand worth rediscovering.

A New Flagship Above the Orféo Grande

AURALIS now sits at the top of the JMR range, above the Orféo Grande, joining a lineup that includes the Lunna MKII, Euterpe Jubilé, Cantabile Jubilé, Abscisse Jubilé, Orféo Jubilé, Orféo Grande, and the compact Voce Grande.

The new floorstander measures 115 cm high, 30 cm wide, and 42 cm deep, or 45.3 x 11.8 x 16.5 inches. Each speaker weighs 45 kg, or 99.2 pounds. That is serious mass, but it is not one of those absurdly oversized high-end monuments that require reinforced flooring, a forklift, and a second mortgage before the first needle drop.

JMR recommends a listening room between 20 and 60 square meters, or roughly 215 to 645 square feet. The speakers should be positioned between 2 and 4 meters apart, or approximately 6.5 to 13 feet center-to-center, with a minimum listening distance of 3 meters, or just under 10 feet. JMR also recommends at least 80 cm, or 31.5 inches, of clearance behind the speakers.

The front-firing port should make AURALIS more flexible than many rear-ported alternatives, but this is still a 99-pound French flagship with real bass energy. Trying to wedge a pair into a Manhattan one-bedroom beside a radiator, a dying ficus, and a framed photo of your ex-wife remains an act of cultural vandalism.

AURALIS Uses JMR’s Tuned Triangular Transmission Line

At the heart of the AURALIS is JMR’s tuned triangular transmission line, a proprietary acoustic loading system that has become one of the company’s most recognizable design signatures.

The goal is not simply to produce more bass. JMR says the tuned triangular transmission line progressively harnesses the rear energy of the drivers to create low frequencies that are spacious, articulate, naturally controlled, and properly integrated with the rest of the spectrum.

That matters because impressive bass and convincing bass are not always the same thing. JMR is aiming for a low end that can follow the music rather than simply announcing its presence every time a bass drum enters the room.

The cabinet itself uses HDF panels ranging from 25 mm to 40 mm thick, or roughly 1.0 to 1.6 inches, depending on where reinforcement is required. JMR uses minimal internal acoustic damping to preserve dynamics, liveliness, and a sense of freedom, while applying viscoelastic compounds at strategic points to control unwanted vibration.

The upper tweeter pod is made from epoxy resin, chosen for its inertness and mechanical stability. It also gives AURALIS a more sculptural silhouette than the usual rectangular tower with a tweeter bolted on top as though someone remembered it five minutes before the design meeting ended.

AURALIS also uses a dedicated decoupled base with no direct mechanical coupling between the cabinet and the floor. Rather than relying on conventional spikes, JMR uses a polymer isolation element refined through listening tests, paired with Teflon pads.

2.5 Way Architecture With a Large AST Tweeter

The AURALIS is a 2.5-way loudspeaker built around two new midbass drivers and a 120 mm AST tweeter.

The two midbass drivers operate together up to 220 Hz, effectively increasing radiating surface area and giving the speaker more energy and ease through the bass region. The upper midbass driver continues higher before handing off to the AST tweeter at 1.8 kHz.

That is a notably low crossover point for a tweeter and one of the more important technical aspects of the design. JMR uses a symmetrical 12 dB-per-octave filter at 1.8 kHz to take advantage of the AST tweeter’s speed, low distortion, dynamic capability, and broad natural presentation through the upper midrange and treble.

This is exactly where a loudspeaker either becomes convincing or starts sounding like a collection of expensive parts arguing in public. Vocals, piano, strings, brass, guitar harmonics, and the emotional wreckage of every audiophile all live in this region. There are therapists in Westchester who have financed fishing boats off this crowd.

Hand-Wired Crossover With Serious Parts Selection

JMR has long treated crossover design as part of the loudspeaker’s voice rather than a generic component board hidden in the bottom of the cabinet. The AURALIS continues that philosophy with a fully hand-wired crossover built without a printed circuit board.

The network uses a deliberately limited number of components to minimize losses, phase rotation, and audible distortion. The 2.5-way topology employs 6 dB and 12 dB-per-octave slopes, with the two midbass drivers working together to 220 Hz and the AST tweeter taking over at 1.8 kHz.

JMR specifies pure copper foil inductors wound on beechwood formers, ClarityCap PUR capacitors, and Path Audio resistors for tweeter attenuation.

The Path Audio resistors use a third grounding terminal and a copper tube intended to provide electromagnetic shielding, heat dissipation, and drainage of parasitic charges. That is the sort of detail that will either delight or irritate the people who believe every resistor sounds identical. Both sides will probably write 2,000 words about it online.

Specifications and Amplifier Matching

JMR rates the AURALIS at 89 dB/W/m sensitivity at 2.83V, with impedance compatible with amplifiers rated for 4 to 8 ohms. Minimum impedance is listed as 4.3 ohms.

The claimed frequency response is 30 Hz to 28 kHz within ±6 dB. Power handling is rated at 250 watts continuous and 400 watts peak, with recommended amplifier power between 40 and 300 watts. Claimed distortion is below 0.2 percent at an 85 dB listening level.

JMR says the AURALIS is compatible with both tube and solid-state amplification and that its impedance curve does not present particular setup challenges. That does not mean AURALIS should be paired with whatever integrated amplifier was rescued from the guest room after a remodel, a divorce, or an unfortunate encounter with a soundbar. Less will not be more here.

The Audiomat system I used to get to know JMR in the 1990s was already in the $20,000 range, including an integrated amplifier, CD transport, phono stage, and DAC. These speakers may not demand brute-force amplification, but they will reward a front end with real resolution, tonal color, and authority.

Woodscore XO Finish and Made in Charente Construction

Visually, AURALIS introduces JMR’s Woodscore XO finish, which combines a seven-layer high-gloss polished treatment with real walnut veneer in a cognac tone, a black front baffle, and a solid machined-aluminum trim piece on the front sub-baffle.

The Woodscore XO finish gives AURALIS an elegant, architectural presence without overwhelming the room. Designed, assembled, quality-controlled, and fine-tuned in Charente, the speaker reflects JMR’s own approach to cabinet construction, acoustic loading, crossover design, and final voicing.

Jean-Marie Reynaud AURALIS Specifications

• Design: 2.5-way floorstanding loudspeaker
• Crossover Slopes: 6 dB / 12 dB / 12 dB per octave
• Impedance: Compatible with 4 to 8 ohm amplifiers; 4.3-ohm minimum
• Frequency Response: 30 Hz to 28 kHz, ±6 dB
• Sensitivity: 89 dB/W/m at 2.83V
• Distortion: Less than 0.2% at 85 dB
• Power Handling: 250 watts continuous
• Peak Power Handling: 400 watts
• Recommended Amplifier Power: 40 to 300 watts
• Speaker Terminals: Single-wire binding posts with a dedicated crossover ground terminal
• Dimensions: 115 × 42 × 30 cm, or 45.3 × 16.5 × 11.8 inches
  • Height: 115 cm / 45.3 inches
  • Depth: 42 cm / 16.5 inches
  • Width: 30 cm / 11.8 inches
• Weight: 45 kg / 99.2 pounds per speaker
• Recommended Listening Area: 20 to 60 m² / approximately 215 to 645 square feet

The Bottom Line

The Jean-Marie Reynaud AURALIS is not another expensive floorstander built to impress for 10 minutes with brute bass, a shiny cabinet, and enough aluminum to repair a small bridge. Its appeal is more specific: JMR’s tuned triangular transmission line, large AST tweeter, hand-wired crossover, front-firing port, and Charente-built cabinet are all aimed at tonal accuracy, bass articulation, coherence, and long-term musical satisfaction.

At €18,000 per pair in Europe, AURALIS enters a serious category that includes the Sonus faber Olympica Nova V, Focal Sopra N°2, Bowers & Wilkins 804 D4 and 803 D4, and Wilson Audio Sabrina V, depending on local pricing. JMR has not announced U.S. or Canadian pricing yet, so the final comparison will depend on where it lands in North America.

For listeners who value inner detail, natural timbre, and finesse over a loudspeaker that behaves like it is auditioning for a Marvel soundtrack, AURALIS looks like one of the more distinctive new arrivals in the high-end category.

For more information: jm-reynaud.com

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Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film has already sparked plenty of conversation, but one of the quickest sellouts tied to it did not involve tickets or posters. Instead, it was a limited-run popcorn container modeled directly after the large-format film camera Nolan has long praised as his go-to tool.

On June 18, the IMAX web store launched their limited edition item, which quickly sold out. This thing originally cost $50, but it’s currently available on resale sites for two or three times that price. What they came up with was far more than a conventional bucket with a logo on the side. Designers worked hard to build an object that resembles the real IMAX 15/65mm camera body that has been used behind the scenes in several of Nolan’s previous works, and it is now also the main camera in The Odyssey. The end result is somewhere between a cool keepsake and a rather functional prop.

You have a large rectangular piece on the side that holds the popcorn and has clean “IMAX THE ODYSSEY” branding in blue and black on it. The camera body is then mounted on top, complete with lens barrel details, adjuster knobs, and a viewfinder, all of which are fairly accurate. Overall the object measures around 14 inches long, 6.25 inches wide and 5.3 inches tall, & the weight is around 1.26 pounds once you’ve removed the eyepiece.

The materials are rather simple, consisting of injection-molded polymers such as acrylic, polypropylene, and ABS, so it’s durable enough to withstand a few trips to the theater while yet being light enough to carry without being a nuisance. They add a small LED light and an LR1130 battery. When you turn on the light and look through the viewfinder, you’ll see a still image from The Odyssey in the unique 1.43:1 enlarged aspect ratio that IMAX uses on their largest displays.

The fact that the light has transformed that simple bucket into something more than simply a bowl; even if the lights are turned off and the trailers are playing, a quick look through the eyepiece gives you a tiny little sampling of the film’s scale before the main feature begins. Early photos show Nolan himself handing over a device to cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and demonstrating the viewfinder during advertising events. It has a decent capacity for popcorn.

IMAX describes the project as a tribute to both their groundbreaking film technology and the art of large-format filmmaking. Nolan has been gushing about their camera system as the “gold standard” for years, and The Odyssey is only the latest chapter in that collaboration. This is essentially a pocket-sized salute to the same equipment that will eventually project the film in its proper format on the biggest screens.
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Day 1 of the BMPS 2026 Grand Finals is officially in the books, and what a day it was. From back-to-back chicken dinners by iQOO Reckoning Esports to Divine Gaming’s late surge to the top of the standings, the opening six matches had everything BGMI fans could ask for. While some fan favorites lived up to expectations, others will be heading into Day 2 with plenty of work left to do.

Reckoning Starts Strong With Back-to-Back Chicken Dinners

The opening match on Rondo immediately set the tone for the day. Team TAG endured a rough start after losing multiple players to Revenant XSpark and eventually became the first team eliminated from the Grand Finals. Meanwhile, iQOO SouL looked sharp early on, picking up multiple eliminations and showing signs of a strong opening. However, it was iQOO Reckoning Esports who stole the spotlight, closing out the match to secure the first chicken dinner of the Grand Finals.

The momentum continued into Match 2 on Erangel. While the early game remained relatively quiet, the action exploded during the final circles around Ferry Pier. Teams like GodLike, Divine Gaming, and Nebula Esports all looked dangerous throughout the match. The final battle came down to Nebula Esports, Genesis Esports, iQOO 8Bit, and Reckoning Esports. Despite Nebula’s strong positioning, 8Bit disrupted their plans, while Genesis Fury put together an impressive individual performance from a watchtower. In the end, Reckoning Esports emerged victorious again, securing back-to-back chicken dinners and establishing themselves as the early favorites.

Erangel Delivers Upsets and Surprises

The third match brought one of the biggest surprises of the day. After winning the first two games, Reckoning Esports became one of the earliest teams eliminated. Genesis and GodLike continued their strong performances throughout the mid-game, while teams like TAG and SouL once again struggled to convert opportunities into points. The final fight saw Gods Esports and iQOO Orangutan battle for the chicken dinner. Orangutan’s lone survivor attempted a clever smoke rotation to outplay the opposition, but the strategy fell short, allowing Gods Esports to claim the victory.

The fourth match finally delivered the military island zone that many fans had been waiting for. Unfortunately for iQOO 8Bit, their game ended before the first circle had even closed. The standout performer here was Nebula Esports. The team secured prime positioning near the center of the zone and successfully defended it against multiple challenges.

Vasista Esports tried to break through but were quickly shut down. As the match entered its closing stages, only Nebula, Orangutan, and Reckoning remained. With Nebula holding a full squad while their rivals were reduced to single players, the outcome felt inevitable. Nebula secured the chicken dinner and, more importantly, climbed into contention for the top spot overall.

Divine Gaming Turns Things Around in Miramar

If the first half belonged to Reckoning and Nebula, the Miramar matches belonged to Divine Gaming. The fifth match featured a relatively central circle, resulting in fewer risky rotations and more direct engagements. Vasista became the first team eliminated after losing a crucial fight against Revenant XSpark. GodLike once again showed flashes of brilliance, winning multiple engagements through well-timed grenades and coordinated pushes. However, they couldn’t sustain the momentum deep into the game. The final showdown came down to Genesis Esports and Divine Gaming. Despite Genesis holding the high ground, Divine managed to outplay them during a tense 3v3 battle and walked away with the chicken dinner.

The final match of the day saw another Miramar zone centered around the southwest side of El Azahar. Once again, TAG found themselves involved in multiple early-game fights, including a lengthy standoff with Gods Reign and Team Tamilas inside a church compound. While TAG picked up a few eliminations, they couldn’t capitalize on the momentum and were eventually eliminated while rotating into the safe zone. SouL’s struggles also continued. The team spent most of the match fighting from a disadvantaged position and eventually exited with just a single elimination. Genesis continued their impressive run by taking down both iQOO 8Bit and Orangutan in consecutive engagements. However, they were unable to convert that momentum into a chicken dinner.

The final battle featured Divine Gaming and Revenant XSpark. Unlike previous endgames, Divine entered the fight with all four players alive and full control of the circle. Revenant attempted to mount a challenge but simply couldn’t break through Divine’s setup. Divine Gaming secured the final chicken dinner of Day 1 and, with it, the overall lead in the standings.

If Day 1 was any indication, fans are in for another action-packed weekend of BGMI esports.