Accessory Reviews

There’s some debate among vinylphiles about whether USB phono preamps need to exist, but I for one am glad they do. When I bring home my latest haul of vinyl from Amoeba Records, I love being able to plug a laptop straight into my NAD PP 3 to make quick MP3s of albums I like so I can listen to them on my smartphone. (Sacrilege!) It’s easier than making an analog connection, and it bypasses the lousy analog-to-digital converter built into my laptop.

With the Zphono-USB, Parasound brings new versatility and features to the USB phono pre concept.

Don’t be fooled by the name and calligraphic logo. You won’t find this Biscotti at Starbucks or the local pastry shop, but it does pop up on Amazon.com when you search “Biscotti TV Phone” (“Biscotti” alone leads you to an excellent selection of the scrumptious Italian biscuits). Although video chatting on computers has been around for years, business-style video conferencing on a big screen is still rare among everyday consumers—something Biscotti Inc. hopes to change with its tiny Biscotti-shaped TV phone.

There are so many Pow! Bang! Ka-chow! buzzwords thrown out by the consumer electronics industry's marketing war chariots that smaller, more important things often get lost or completely overwhelmed in the ground clutter.

Pretty and Pretty Smart

I don’t know what they put in the water cooler at Logitech, but I want to start drinking it. The Harmony One is another in its long list of affordable universal remote controls. It looks great, is easy to program, and is sweetly simple to use. The Harmony One is as narrow as most single-device remotes, but it’s thinner and surprisingly light. It’s even easier to hold and use. At the business end is a bright 1.25-by-1.5-inch color touchscreen with enough resolution that you can easily recognize the tiny DVD logo on the DVD player icon. The backlit hard keys are distinctly grouped together by function (transport, numeric keypad, etc.). Although the individual keys are only slightly larger than those on an average remote, each has its own unique shape and is spaced far enough apart so that you can easily use the remote for basic operations without looking at it. The Harmony One includes a built-in motion sensor that’s supposed to wake the remote when you pick it up. It’s not super sensitive, though, so sometimes you’ll need to give the remote a quick shake to bring it to life. To recharge the battery, just place the remote in its horizontal charging cradle. My older Harmony 890 is sometimes finicky and refuses to make contact—and therefore doesn’t charge—when resting in its cradle. This one has a deeper well that ensures a solid connection between the contact points on the remote and the charging cradle. By the way, the rechargeable battery is removable and replaceable, much like a cordless phone’s battery. This makes it environmentally friendly, and it won’t force you to buy a new remote when the battery finally expires.

To Have and to Hold

To say I’ve found and fallen in love with the perfect universal remote control wouldn’t be 100-percent correct. After all, the NevoS70 certainly has its flaws. But then so do I, and yet my wife loves me anyway. In the case of Universal Electronics’ NevoS70, there are so many good features, it’s hard to remember any that might not be so good. First and foremost, the NevoS70’s shape is a great fit for the average person’s hand (a.k.a. my hand). Because of the way the back of the remote control’s case curves and where the unit’s center of gravity is located, the most comfortable and natural way to hold the remote puts the most-used keys (volume, channel, and directional keypad) within easy reach of your thumb. From there, it’s not much of a stretch to reach the touchscreen. A small scroll wheel for navigation is mounted on the right side of the remote (I’m sure not coincidentally), which is exactly where your thumb rests when it’s not pressing the keys on the front. Should you need or want it, the right side of the remote’s casing also stores a standard PDA-type stylus.

Who needs a universal remote? As far as I'm concerned, just about anyone with a media system, even as simple as a DVD player connected to a TV. Almost every piece of A/V equipment sold today offers its own remote with "universal" functionality, but these are cumbersome and offer limited programmability compared to third-party remotes.