iPods Hot at Recent CEDIA — Audio companies of every type were
hawking equipment designed to work with iPods and other brands of MP3
players at the CEDIA Expo which closed Sunday in Indianapolis.
Among the firms showing iPod docks to let consumers play back their
data-reduced music from any room in the house were SpeakerCraft,
Sonance, Creston, ADA, Niles, Oxmoor and Russound. There was also a
selection of home audio receivers which controlled docked iPods and
reproduced the sound thru high end audio systems — many of which
include Pro Logic II and other technologies to upscale the iPod’s
two-channel audio into multichannel. Among companies showing their
first iPod-controlling receivers were Denon, Harman Kardon and Pioneer,
joining models from Onkyo and Integra. Docking stations equipped
with an amp and stereo speakers were displayed by Bose, Klipsch,
Monitor Audio and others. Advocates see iPods as an adjunct to a home
music system, not as a replacement for a main hard drive music server
which has a greater storage capacity and can store in uncompressed
formats that will sound superior on a high end music system.
Hitachi Introduces 1TB DTV Recorder — One terabyte of storage on
a video recorder? That’s enough room for over two months of
continuous TV (from one channel), using the unit’s lowest quality
recording mode. But the large capacity (using a pair of 500GB
hard disk drives) is not for that but for HDTV, which requires much
more storage space. Most digital video recorders today will fill
up their disc quickly with only a few HDTV shows being time-shifted. In
HDTV mode, the new recorder can hold 68 hours of programming at the
highest-quality mode. The recorder will retail for about $2000, but
users who may want to save some of the time-shifted programs to DVD
will be stuck because no recordable hi-def DVD yet exists, and when
they are introduced later this year they will not be recordable. They
will have to downconvert them to standard DVD and lose the hi-def
quality.
Push for Networked Digital Home Storage — The Diffusion Group,
doing consumer digital and new media research, has issued a new report
finding that consumers will increasingly be looking to non-PC storage
solutions for housing digital content created by their various
digital devices. The amount of personal content generated by consumer
digital electronic devices is expected to grow from about 322GB per
average home today to 1933GB in 2010. An analyst with The Diffusion
Group states that tomorrow’s digital home will support many multimedia
sharing devices, such as MP3 players, digital still and video cameras,
DVRs and digital AV players. Consumers will look for a single “home
storage utility” — a storage platform that is networked and can share
with both fixed and mobile PC and CE devices. Ultimately the utility
will operate transparently to the user, automatically backing up all
networked fixed and mobile devices, and storing and transferring large
multimedia files both in the home and away from it.
