If you married your iPod but sometimes find yourself cheating with satellite radio, there's now a way to simplify your gadget love life. Pioneer's Inno is a portable XM tuner/MP3 player with a hard disk that stores both recorded XM programs (up to 50 hours!) and MP3 or WMA music files. You can bookmark songs in the XM recordings and mix them with your own music into playlists.
With a sleek silver-gray finish, full-color LCD screen, and seductive curves, the Harmony 890 is ready for the centerfold of Remote Monthly. But it's not just another pretty wand - the 890 sends commands to your system via both infrared and RF (radio-frequency) signals, so you don't even have to be in the same room as your gear.
It's the side view of a speaker with no sides - and no back either! Jamo's dipolar Reference R 909 ($15,000 a pair) has two 15-inch woofers, a 5.5-inch midrange, and a 1-inch tweeter. But it doesn't have a traditional cabinet.
Cable viewers who also want their HDTV have found their love affair with TiVo becoming strained the past few years. That's because TiVo's Series 2 recorders, unlike the DVRs leased by cable operators, have proved stubbornly incompatible with high-def channels. Hoping to make amends, TiVo has unveiled the Series 3 HD Digital Media Recorder with two CableCARD slots.
Yes, it's two, two radios in one: the style is retro, but the technology is Space Age. Debuting at the Consumer Electronics Show and set for a spring launch, this tabletop model from Crosley offers AM and FM, but it's the company's first product equipped for XM satellite radio - hence its name, Explorer 1 ($250).
Within a day of returning from the consumer electronics show, I was asked the same question by at least 10 people: "What was the most exciting product you saw in Las Vegas?" Unfortunately, my answer didn't excite anyone because, aside from a few clever little gadgets, I didn't see anything thrilling.
For all of the benefits the digital revolution has brought to music - like streaming, unprecedented portability, and the ease of sorting and managing large collections - some people see it as not only a travesty but also a threat. Granted, these are usually the same people who lament the supposed lack of any advancement in audio quality since the birth of vinyl. But do they have a point?
The compact Targus SoundUP iPod sound enhancer plugs into any third- or fourth-generation iPod or iPod photo and is said to "recreate studio-quality sound" from digitally compressed music. That's a big claim for such a little device - one we had to check out.
