Chris Chiarella

With Omnifi, your MP3s are everywhere you want to be.

Liberating gear such as that manufactured by Omnifi, a division of Rockford Fosgate, compels me to look at where I spend the bulk of my waking hours: at the office, in the home theater, or in the car. As with all great action heroes, my daily adventures are set to music—not a problem when I'm chained to my desk with my entire music library at my disposal on my hard drive. A portable player is one way to transcend the confines of the workspace, and some even arrive bundled with cables to plug into a hi-fi system for all to enjoy, but this is hardly an elegant approach.

Home networking is about to hop forward with the arrival of SkipJam, a hardware/software solution for watching, listening to, and digitally recording entertainment content housewide. With a wired or wireless network and an iMedia Center box in your stack of home theater gear, enjoy TV (including satellite) and more on the PC and share any audio/video source with an iMedia Player anywhere in the home, view/hear PC files in the living room, or bypass the computer altogether and simply network all your A/V devices directly, with high-quality audio and video including 24-bit/192-kilohertz DAC/ADCs with 114db dynamic range. Look for a hands-on review in an upcoming issue of Home Theater.

Bose was nice enough to show me their new Lifestyle 38 ($2,999) and 48 ($3,999) home entertainment systems recently, with the nifty uMusic intelligent playback system: Music can be ripped from CD and stored on an internal hard drive (capacity unspecified at press time), but even without the benefit of an Internet connection all songs are automatically tagged with extensive track information, from a vast onboard database. In addition to helping organize and access your tunes as never before, this data can be used to create "smart" playlists automatically, with variety yet a related sound, nimbly transitioning from Steely Dan to Michael McDonald (former Dan member) to The Doobie Brothers (McDonald's subsequent group), as one mellow example.

There's always something different at CES.

The Consumer Electronics Show is sort of the Super Bowl of our industry, as manufacturers of just about everything that accepts AC, DC, or batteries descend upon Las Vegas each winter to parade what's new and what's coming soon. Given the presence of all the wonderful new products that blur the lines between consumer electronics and computers at this year's show, it looks like I've got my work cut out for me as convergence editor. Here's a quick look at some of the most interesting arrivals.