Ten O'Clock Tech: The Case Of The Missing CD
By Arik Hesseldahl
There comes a moment in the life of any music lover when the compact disc case is bare. You reach for that one CD that fits your mood, open the case and...nothing. The disc, for some inexplicable reason, is gone.
Maybe it was loaned to a friend or left in the car. Wherever it is at that very moment, the CD you most want to hear is useless.
With the AudioRequst CD player from ReQuest Multimedia, it won't matter. As long as that CD has been played at least once, its contents are stored in a hard drive inside the player.
With a memory like an elephant, the hard drive, depending on which model you buy, can store either 350 or 525 hours of digital music. Play a CD once, and it's stored forever, or until you decide you don't want it stored anymore. It interfaces with your TV set through an S-Video connection, and displays your playlists, which you can edit and select using the bundled remote control. It will work with TV sets both in the U.S. and Europe.
Built for the true digital music fanatic, this home stereo component plays traditional audio CDs, CD-Rs and CD-RWs. It also plays MP3s and Windows Media audio files. It will encode CDs as well, and has connections to accept audio from other sources, including digital audio tapes, traditional cassette tapes, Mini Discs or even those aging record turntables or eight-track tape decks. If your favorite eight-track with polka tunes still hasn't been released on CD, now you can burn it yourself. It also has an input jack for microphones and will one day support voice recording and karaoke functions.
It also contains two Universal Serial Bus (USB) connection ports, which enable it to share songs with SonicBlue's (Nasdaq: SBLU - news) Rio series of MP3 players. It also has Ethernet and parallel ports that allow it to connect to the PC. Oddly enough, the player is almost a PC itself. It has a hard drive, and contains an Intel (Nasdaq: INTC - news) Celeron microprocessor, as well as a 3D accelerator chip to help boost the appearance of its graphical user interface on TV sets. You can even connect a PC keyboard using one of the two USB ports.
The player is also network-ready. If you're one of the brave souls who's jumped early into the world of home networking, you'll find the AudioRequest ready to connect to several types of home networking technologies, including Home Phoneline networks, wireless networks or standard Ethernet. This will let you stream music to other devices in the house. It will also let the player share an Internet connection through either a cable modem or digital subscriber line, which allows it to automatically look up the name and track list of almost any CD it plays.
Prices vary, depending on the size of the hard drive. The 20-gigabyte version sells for $800, which also comes in 20-GB and 30-GB versions and sells for $1,200.
A second-generation version of the device, dubbed the AudioRequest II, is in development now. Set to debut in the fall, it will hold more music, and cost more, about $1,600, the company says.
Computer maker Compaq Computer (NYSE: CPQ - news) is prepping a similar device for release later this year. Dubbed the iPaq Music Center, it will store CDs played on its 20-GB hard drive, but it won't record on the CD-RW discs because of copyright concerns. It will also come with a 56-kilobyte-per-second dialup modem, meant for listening to Internet radio.
Both are part of the developing craze for MP3 ``jukeboxes'' that store massive amounts of music and connect to home stereo systems. While some devices require a PC somewhere in the process, these two are obviously meant to stand as high-end stereo system components, but also to work with other devices in the house.
And if nothing else, you'll never have to worry about misplacing a CD again.
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