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The Gift of Music
What to get the music heads in your life
All this week I've been blogging about gadget-giving season and the year's best gifts. Yesterday I wrote about games. Today I'll tackle music devices.
This isn't going to be a very merry Christmas for the music labels; CD sales are declining faster than in years past, and their usually reliable seasonal box set business has been hampered by the closing of Tower Records. But it's looking like a great year for the technology companies who make MP3 players and other digital music devices — perhaps not coincidentally. Here are my recommendations:
For the person who has everything
I made fun of the hype, but playing with a neighbor's model has made me a believer in Apple's iPhone. It's still only an average phone, and the touch keyboard makes it an underperforming e-mail device. But the ease with which it accesses Google Maps and YouTube makes up for that. And it's still the best mobile music device on the market.
For the person who has everything, including a cell phone
If you don't need a phone, Apple's iTouch may be the best mobile music device on the market. At 8 or 16 gigs, it won't hold an entire music collection, but the flash memory it uses is sturdier than a hard drive, the screen is big and bright enough to enjoy videos, and the WiFi-enabled shopping is the smoothest interface yet for buying music.
For the person who has everything, including too many CDs
This year marked the beginning of the end of the CD. In the future, for better or worse, music will be digital, invisible, and intangible. Unfortunately, most of the places to store it are clunky and hard to integrate with a stereo. One exception is the digital music system from Sonos, a solid and well designed device that hooks up to your home network and gives you a way to play all the music on your PC, plus Rhapsody and Sirius, through speakers or a stereo. It also streams music wirelessly to a smaller device called the "ZoneBridge," so you can hear any music in any room. Ay, technology!
This isn't going to be a very merry Christmas for the music labels; CD sales are declining faster than in years past, and their usually reliable seasonal box set business has been hampered by the closing of Tower Records. But it's looking like a great year for the technology companies who make MP3 players and other digital music devices — perhaps not coincidentally. Here are my recommendations:
For the person who has everything
I made fun of the hype, but playing with a neighbor's model has made me a believer in Apple's iPhone. It's still only an average phone, and the touch keyboard makes it an underperforming e-mail device. But the ease with which it accesses Google Maps and YouTube makes up for that. And it's still the best mobile music device on the market.
For the person who has everything, including a cell phone
If you don't need a phone, Apple's iTouch may be the best mobile music device on the market. At 8 or 16 gigs, it won't hold an entire music collection, but the flash memory it uses is sturdier than a hard drive, the screen is big and bright enough to enjoy videos, and the WiFi-enabled shopping is the smoothest interface yet for buying music.
For the person who has everything, including too many CDs
This year marked the beginning of the end of the CD. In the future, for better or worse, music will be digital, invisible, and intangible. Unfortunately, most of the places to store it are clunky and hard to integrate with a stereo. One exception is the digital music system from Sonos, a solid and well designed device that hooks up to your home network and gives you a way to play all the music on your PC, plus Rhapsody and Sirius, through speakers or a stereo. It also streams music wirelessly to a smaller device called the "ZoneBridge," so you can hear any music in any room. Ay, technology!
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