Boombox made for summer parties

By Ric Manning
The Louisville Courier Journal

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most read articles Most e-mailed articles

Boomboxes can be difficult to love.

Some are too big and too heavy. Many have too many buttons and features. And a lot of them sound pretty crummy.

Apparently, a lot people think so, too. The consumer-electronics-industry trade association says sales of boomers declined almost 10 percent last year. People who want music to go are buying MP3 players and headphone stereos.

But, as Martha and the Vandellas put it, summer's here and the time is right for dancing in the street. And you can't do that with an iPod.

If you want Black Eyed Peas on the beach or Norah Jones on the deck, you need more than a pocket player.

The Sony Sports S2 boombox (about $110) fills the bill nicely. It looks, feels and, best of all, sounds good.

Start with the S2's unique design. The unit is built around two tubular speaker chambers. The front drivers are offset at an angle, which gives the sound a wider dispersion, and the chambers are vented in the back to add more power to the bass.

A thick plastic bar linking the two speaker chambers serves as the player's handle. It's more comfortable and secure than the flip-up handles found on most other blasters.

The CD player is positioned between the speakers and above a small, amber-colored display window. The unit has no cassette player, but it does have an AM/FM radio with a telescoping antenna and station presets.

The unit will run on AC power or six D-cell batteries. With the batteries installed, the unit weighs about 8 pounds.
 
One of the S2's primary attractions is its ability to play discs encoded with MP3 files. You can put more than 140 songs on one CD and hit shuffle play and listen to about seven hours of music.

The player takes almost half a minute to read and digest a CD-R before it starts to play. It pauses for a few seconds between cuts and occasionally clips the first second or two off the start of a song, but the S2 didn't fail to play any of the home-burned CDs tested.

The S2 also scores well in the power category. You can crank the volume up enough to fill a back yard and annoy your neighbors without hearing any distortion.

What's missing? An input for an outside source would make the S2 a great speaker and amplifier for an MP3 player.

Another missing feature is a remote control.

The next boom in boomboxes will feature players that can tune in satellite-radio services. The first of those units are starting to appear this summer.

Cambridge SoundWorks has announced plans to produce the first satellite-radio boombox with a rechargeable battery. The $199 PlayDock XM works with the $119 Delphi XM Roady receiver, which comes with a car docking kit.

The PlayDock has an AC adapter, two main speakers and a bass speaker. It delivers 10 hours of battery operation.

Delphi's $199 XM CD Audio System is a satellite-radio boombox that also offers AM/FM radio and a CD player. Like the PlayDock, it also requires an XM receiver, Delphi's SKYFi unit. ($99).

Two new portable stereos work with the Sirius satellite-radio service.

Audiovox has a docking station that works with either of two Audiovox transportable Sirius tuners.

The least expensive portable satellite rig is the Streamer Boombox from Brix Labs. It consists of a $99 dock box and a $99 tuner. The Streamer is sold primarily through truck dealers and at truck stops.

Velocity SATA Automatic Backup System

CMS Products www.cmsproducts.com, 800-327-5773

$300

Bad things happen. And for some of us with computers, they happen all the time. But now that CMS Products has come up with the 80-gigabyte Velocity SATA Automatic Backup System, an external hard drive, those of us whose hard drives become victims of foul play or fate can have a reasonable backup plan.

The Velocity SATA Automatic Backup System is a hard drive that you can boot from even if your regular hard-disk drive has fallen and can't get up. This is an external serial ATA drive that works faster than an external hard drive connected to your computer by a FireWire or Universal Serial Bus port 2.0 cable.

If you don't have a SATA controller card installed, you'll need to open your computer case and slide the card that comes with the CMS into a place holder. That means it doesn't actually need a slot to fit into, just a cutout to fit it. Windows then recognizes it once you turn on your computer.

Now, you could just use the Velocity as another drive. For those of us doing digital video or photography, the 80-gigabyte drive may be helpful, but really isn't worth the expense. But if you install the BounceBack Professional software that comes with the drive, you can use the drive to back up things on your internal hard drive. And that makes it more than worth the price of the device.

About two gigabytes of data from my hard drive took less than two minutes to transfer to the backup drive. A Firewire-connected drive took closer to six minutes. So this puppy is fast, fast, fast.

The BounceBack Professional software partitioned and formatted the Velocity in much the way that my original hard drive had been formatted and partitioned. Once I backed up files on the drive — which stores them in their native file formats for easy use — it was no problem booting from the hard drive and working from there as if it had always been my hard drive.

You'll need a minimum of 128 megabytes of RAM and 15 megabytes of hard-disk space. This only works with Windows 2000 and XP.

— Kevin Washington

The Baltimore Sun