iPaq Music Center
$799, by Compaq Computer Corp.
www.compaq.com/ipaqaudio
Compaq Computer’s new iPaq Music Center, a $799 piece of audio equipment that uses a hard disk to store tunes, is at least a year ahead of its time–a wonderful example of what lies ahead but in no way worth buying now.
By digitizing music into a compressed format–such as the MP3 standard wildly popular on the Internet–you can store a huge collection of music on the typical hard disk.
Because a hard disk can instantly access any piece of recorded data, it’s easy to put together complex custom play lists–pulling together tracks from different albums, for example–with none of the lag time you’d get with a mechanical CD changer.
The 12-pound black box, the same shape and size of a videocassette recorder, plugs into a home audio system, a television set, an AC electric outlet or a telephone line. A standard CD player is built into the Music Center. The primary way to get tracks into the Music Center is putting a CD in the drive, then pushing the “record” button on the remote. In about 5 to 12 minutes, the Music Center converts the CD’s contents to MP3 tracks on the hard disk. The Music Center also goes online to check a database of music CDs to automatically identify the name of the album, the recording artist and the names of the songs.
The audio quality of songs converted to MP3 and stored on the Music Center was excellent. . But there were weaknesses in the Music Center that drowned out the good vibrations.
There’s no easy way to directly transfer music on your PC’s hard disk to the Music Center. If you have to burn the music on a CD-R first, you might as well get one of the new CD players that also read MP3 discs.
Also, the Music Center only connects to online services that use standard Internet dial-up procedures. That means AOL’s 30 million subscribers would need to sign up for another dial-up Internet service to use the Music Center.
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