HiFi Blog: digital audio goodness

iPod rivals vie for piece of Apple’s pie: a good wrap-up of the iPod competitors that showed up in CES, with quotes from executives.

CES 2006: SanDisk announces the 1GB microSD card: it’s the world’s smallest 1GB flash memory card. First ones to enjoy this card, which goes by a suggested retail price of $120, will be Verizon’s V Cast customers.

Happy news for the miniature hard drive camp. Cornice said they’ll be releasing 8GB and 10GB 1-inch drives under the Dragon series later in Q1. The drives, which are ~40% smaller than the previous 4GB incarnation at 30×40×3.5mm, are mainly to be used in mobile phones. As is the case with most microdrives, care has [...]

CES 2006: Neuros Audio says revised 442 is coming: Neuros 442 v2 is in the works and scheduled for release in late Q2 2006; it’ll be based on the TI DM320 chipset and sport a 24bit/96kHz DAC, among other improvements. The Neuros III (kinda like the 442 minus the video part) is also in the [...]

LG Electronics announced they’ll be entering the US portable media market in April with three products.

The PM70 (pictured here, skip to the bottom of the post) is a 30GB PVR that can record MPEG-4 video directly from a composite video input. It’s got a 4.3-inch widescreen, sports a video-out so it can connected to TV [...]

One of the first devices to sport a .85-inch 4GB hard drisk inside, Cowon’s latest offering seems stunning (eye candy here). The 1.3-inch, 260k-color OLED display allows you to watch your MPEG-4 videos (it does JPEG pictures and texts too). Audio-wise, OGG and FLAC support (besides MP3/WMA/WAV) is sure to please audio enthusiasts—there’s Windows Media [...]

Toshiba’s Gigabeat S (video – pictures) seemed to be one of the best products displayed at CES.

First reports claim this PMC’s 2.4-inch (320×240) QVGA LCD does a fine job displaying DRM’d MPEG-2 videos—so it’ll work with video subscription services such as Vongo—as well as TiVo Series 2 downloads. The device, which feels light and sturdy, [...]

With no interesting new products to show, the U10 was the center of attention. They’re about to retire the H10 series and base their new line of offerings on the U10’s design. There was talk about large screens, 1.8-inch hard drives and PlaysForSure support for these upcoming products. Engadget has shot a video with this [...]

Four products of note, and glad to see Rio’s inventive spirit lives on:

the powerful light-on-consumption STMP3600 System on Chip which they’re plugging to ODMs (Original Design Manufacturers) and is in production now
a reference design for a slim flash-based MP3 player, built on the STMP3600, with video capabilities and support for OGG, music subscription services, as [...]

Pioneer and Samsung released two MP3 players that double as XM receivers. The Pioneer Inno XM2go (pictured on the right—more pictures) and Samsung’s Helix XM2go are basically the same devices: same specs, same design, just slightly different enclosures (and we prefer the Inno’s brushed steel look a bit better, but that’s just us).

You get 1GB [...]