Feb 08,2001
Digital-Music Tidal Wave
Invades the Family Room
By Walter S. Mossberg
And now, the digital-music tidal wave invades the family room. After conquering the PC and unleashing a flood of hand-held players, digital music in the form of MP3 computer files is about to make the leap into the home-audio system.
This spring, a number of big-name companies, including Compaq and RCA, are planning to introduce audio jukeboxes that hook up to your main stereo system. These boxes can create and play MP3 files and store them on large internal hard disks, all without the use of personal computers.
The idea is to marry the freedom and personalization of digital music with the power and quality of the best circuitry and speakers in the house.
For a couple of years now, it has been possible to create digital collections of your favorite songs in the MP3 format, either by converting your existing CDs or by downloading music from the Internet. The trouble is, you either have to play back this music on crummy PC speakers or via hand-held music players meant mainly for use with headphones.
So full-fledged MP3 audio components -- the size, shape and color of CD or DVD players -- are the next stage. I've been testing the first of these digital decks, a product introduced last year by a small Troy, N.Y., company called ReQuest Multimedia. At $799, the AudioReQuest home-stereo jukebox is for the serious music lover.
Neither it nor the big-name competitors coming soon are cheap enough for mass appeal. But if you have a large MP3 collection, as I do, it's a terrific enhancement to your musical life.
The AudioReQuest-20 model I tested in my family room contains a 20 gigabyte hard disk that can hold about 350 hours of music. That's more than 7,000 typical songs, recorded in the MP3 format at CD quality. A higher-capacity model with 50% more storage costs $1,199. An even newer model with the ability to record, or burn, CDs will cost $1,600 when it appears later this year.
All the models also have a CD drive, which can be used to play either standard audio CDs or CDs crammed with MP3 files.
Setting up the AudioReQuest is pretty simple. You just plug its audio outputs into your audio system and its video output into a video input on your television set, VCR or audio/video receiver, depending on your setup at home. Why is your TV set involved? Because the user interface, which allows you to select what music to hear, appears on your TV screen.
The system is controlled via a remote control and the interface on the TV screen. To the left on the screen are various ways to view your music collection -- by artist, album or genre. To the right are the song titles in alphabetical order.
You can play one or more albums, all or some of the songs by one or more artists, or any other combination of songs. You can construct playlists of various mixes for replay at any time. Or the system will just randomly select songs to play.
I've had hours of pleasure playing music from my collection of roughly 1,700 songs, mostly culled from CDs accumulated over the years that were stashed in various places in my house and car. It's wonderful to have all the music I love in one place, able to be mixed and matched at my whim.
My only gripe is with the remote control. It's so crammed with buttons and functions that it takes a long time to figure out. Even worse, the infrared receiver on the unit is so small that you have to be sitting in a perfect location for it to work all the time.
How does one get music into the AudioReQuest? Well, if you have MP3 tunes already on your PC, you can either hook the unit up to a PC via a cable to transfer the songs, or burn the songs from the PC onto data CDs and use the CD drive on the AudioReQuest to copy them from these CDs onto the unit's hard disk.
If you don't have songs on a PC, you can just feed your regular music CDs into the AudioReQuest, one at a time, select the songs you want to record to the hard disk, and press a button.
The current models can't directly download songs from the Internet. You can network the AudioReQuest to a PC and play songs stored on the computer, but this feature isn't very appealing in a device that has its own large storage capacity. You can also transfer music from the AudioReQuest to a Rio portable MP3 player.
How will the new competitors from Compaq, RCA and others differ from the AudioReQuest? Well, they're all designed by a new company called OpenGlobe, of Indianapolis, and they will be able to connect to the Internet and to display on the TV screen the album covers of the songs you play. They'll also include the ability to play Internet radio. At least one high-end model will include a DVD player and an audio receiver.
On the downside, the OpenGlobe devices won't let you see your songs in one big list, or view them by artist. And they will have some advertising, hoping to get you to buy CDs online.
For now, I can recommend the basic $799 AudioReQuest to anyone with the cash and a good stereo system for whom listening to music is an important pursuit. Mossberg's Mailbox column in Tech Center.
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