Pioneer Music.tap pipes audio over power lines

Pioneer have announced the Pioneer Music.tap, a new audio system that lets you pipe your music from your HiFi to speakers over the power lines. The main audio system is separate from the speakers,as you’d expect, but rather than connecting the two together via old-fashioned speaker wire, or even new technologies such as WiFi or Bluetooth, the Music.Tap uses domestic power lines.

This means you can put your speakers in any room in the house, with no messing about with complicated WiFi setups, security settings or intermittent service getting in the way of your audio delights.

More details and pictures of the Pioneer Music.tap after the jump.

The Pioneer Music.tap includes the speakers (naturally), a Sound Station (the main audio unit), and an iPod dock for, well, docking with your iPod. In addition, the Sound Station also has a USB port, which interfaces with USB-based MP3 players, and an analogue line-in, which interfaces with any other audio equipment you might have.

Even more impressively, the speakers have built-in motion sensors, so they only turn on when someone’s in the room in which they’re located. Very green!

If you want your music piped throughout your house, but don’t want the complexity of a Wi-Fi based solution such as Philips’ Streamium, then the Pioneer Music.tap’s power-line system might just be worth checking out.

The Pioneer Music.tap release date is March 2007, and will cost $600. You can also buy extra speakers for $170-$230 a pop (depending on size), and an extra iPod dock for $120 (though not sure why you’d want more than one iPod dock).

[Source: GearFuse]