Best of all is the sound, though. With 40W per channel speakers, it’ll blast your tunes out with impressive clarity, while the built-in DAB radio, CD player and USB port gives you access to music from loads of other sources, not just your iPod.

Although not as fully featured as Network Music Systems such as the Denon Ceol or Marantz Melody Media, the Onkyo CS545-UK isn’t as expensive either. In fact, it’s less than half the price, yet still sounds glorious. All it lacks is the network connectivity.

So if you need a great sounding Hi-Fi mini system that will have your iPod sounding better than it ever has done, but you’re not too fussed about wireless streaming, give the Onkyo CS-545UK a whirl. It does exactly what you want it to in a classy, simple and great sounding way. Which is all you really need at the end of the day!

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At first glance, it seems to be just a normal CD player and amp, albeit with an iPod dock on top of it – but that in itself is nothing unusual. Scratch under the surface, though, and you’ll find a surprising list of connectivity features that make the RCD-N7 one of the most connected hi-fi systems you can get your hands on – and as it’s from Denon, you can bet the sound’s extremely impressive as well.

The Denon RCD-N7 features

OK, so what’s so special about the RCD-N7? Well, in addition to its traditional role of being a CD player, it’s also got a 65W amp, an iPod dock, a USB input for plugging your MP3 players into it, a radio, and support for a wide range of audio formats, including FLAC.

And then it has something just a little bit special.

Like built-in Wi-Fi, DLNA, and support for Windows Media Player version 11, Apple AirPlay and Internet Radio.

What this means is that you can stream your tunes directly from your PC, Mac, iPhone and iTunes, and have the tunes played through the RCD-N7′s crystal clear audio circuits, before being pumped out by its beefy amp.

Better still, you can download an app for your iPhone or iPod that controls the RCD-N7 remotely, letting you use your iPhone or iPod as a remote control.

In short, the Denon RCD-N7 is what all small hi-fi units should have been for the past five years! Happily, Denon at least have caught on, and so hopefully this will be the start of an increasing number of ultra-connected, socially aware Hi-Fi systems.

[Source: Akihabara News]

The Sony Giga-Juke NAS-EH35HD looks it could be the perfect mini Hi-Fi for those of you with thousands of MP3 tunes locked away on your PC, as it combines the aural excellence of Sony’s mini Hi-Fis with the modern day features such as Hard Disks and iPod docks that are needed to fully integrate into the modern audio set-up.

I’m hoping it’s the perfect Hi-Fi anyway, as I’m in exactly that situation. I have even more specific requirements though:

• I like listening to the radio, and would like to record some shows for later listening in my car
• I want to transfer tunes seamlessly between my PC and my MP3 player
• I want good quality sound
• I want an easy to use system that doesn’t require a PhD in Computer Science to operate
• I want a Hi-Fi that stores thousands of songs so I don’t need to go looking for wherever I placed a CD

So, with that little lot in mind, can the Sony Giga-Juke NAS-EH35HD fulfill my needs? Well, yes and no.

The Sony Giga-Juke NAS-EH35HD’s good points

The Sony Giga-Juke NAS-EH35HD is a good looking mini Hi-Fi with buit-in 80GB Hard drive, USB slot, CD player and DAB radio. At first glance, then, you’d think it meets all my requirements.

And it does, in many ways. Although 80GB isn’t huge, it’s big enough for the majority of my more popular tunes, and means I can listen to different tracks endlessly without having to get up and change the CD!

The inclusion of DAB radio as well as FM is great, and better still is that all radio stations can be recorded directly onto whatever you stick in the GigaJuke’s USB slot. Although my car radio doesn’t have a USB slot, my MP3 payer does, so I can simply record onto that and I’m good to go.

Equally, anything on my MP3 player (or USB stick for that matter) can also be dumped onto the Giga Juke’s hard drive. It’ll even rip CDs directly onto the hard drive (imagine that!). And, although it’s only a mini Hi-Fi, it does produce some excellent audio, at least for the type of system it is.

The Sony Giga-Juke NAS-EH35HD’s bad points

As far as the bad points are concerned, these seem to centre on the Giga Juke’s method for handling MP3 files. In particular, it’s not very user friendly, and will require you to manually rename some of your MP3 tunes in your PC in order to get them into the Giga Juke in the first place- otherwise, it’ll lose them forever as some no-name file that you’ll only ever stumble on again through pure chance!

The Giga-Juke does use GraceNote to recognize the tunes, but apparently this doesn’t work very well, with an outdated database that doesn’t actually recognize many tunes!

Summary

So, should I buy a Sony Giga-Juke NAS-EH35HD or not? If you’ve got a Giga Juke, let me know your experiences in the comments below. Equally, if you know of a better Hi-Fi with hard disk for around

In the spirit of ever-tedious eco-friendliness, JVC has endowed the GN6 with a standby mode, whereby the Micro system falls into a power saving sleep when it’s not been used for a while. No problem there. However, rather than instantly waking up whenever a button is pushed, JVC have incorporated a motion detection system into the GN6, so it wakes up whenever it detects movement directly in front of you.

So, how often do you think the GN6 will wake up each night when your curious and somewhat bored cat decides to spend the whole night running around the room?! Nice idea, but it does smack ever so slightly of badly-thought through gimmick!

The system itself looks pretty good, though. Aside from its physical good looks and its obvious integration with the iPod, it also connects to a variety of other devices through a USB port in the front. Its controls are operated by a ‘laser-touch’ system, which simply means you only have to breath on them for them to operate.

Again, the cat’s going to have a field day – it can wake up the hi-fi by walking in front of it, and then start playing tunes and turning the volume up with just the swish of its tail! What were you thinking of, JVC?!

[Source: Akihabara News]

The new Cambridge Audio Sonata is a 40W per channel amp and 2.1 channel DAB receiver for

Logitech released a new Squeezebox earlier this year, the Logitech Squeezebox Duet. This was the first new Squeezebox since Logitech took over the company, and given Logitech’s previous background of building computer mice and keyboards, more than a few people were wondering whether a new Logitech-based Squeezebox would be as good as its predecessor?

Fortunately, they needn’t have worried. The Logitech Squeezebox Duet has received rave reviews and is a great addition to your Hi-Fi setup if you’ve got a lot of tunes trapped deep inside the bowels of your PC or Mac. Indeed, so good have been the reviews for the Duet, that TestFreaks (a site that rates gadgets by aggregating thousands of reviews from across the Web) have rated it their best Audio gadget – out of 578 different Hi-Fi devices – with a score of 10/10.

The new Logitech Squeezebox Duet differs in looks from the old Squeezebox by putting most of the controls and the display on a new remote control with a large 2.4″ LCD. This lets you choose the tunes you want to listen without the bother of getting off your couch!

Better still, the Duet also connects directly to Pandora, Slacker Internet Radio, Rhapsody and iTunes without the need for a PC, meaning you can listen to your tunes from these services without having to boot-up.

If you have thousands of tunes locked inside your PC (Windows or Linux) or Mac, poor, tinny PC speakers and a great Hi-Fi, you owe it to yourself and your tunes to buy the Logitech Squeezebox Duet.

So, in no particular order, here’s a list of the 16 next-gen gadgets you’ll want to buy in 2009.

Super-thin and super-smooth HDTVs

HDTVs have suddenly dropped in price and look set to go mainstream by the end of 2008. For 2009, expect the newer models to come super-slim. How slim? How about slimmer than your mobile phone? Amongst the exhibitors were the following tiny TVs:

• Sharp XS1 LCD TV. 65″ viewing screen, just 23mm thick (see pic). Due in 2009, with a huge 131″ screen coming out the year after.
• Sony ZX1 LCD TV. 40″ viewing screen,super crisp picture, and an incredible 9.9mm thin. Available in the next few months, but for a whopping $4,000!
• Philips 32″ LCD TV – just 8mm thin! Only a prototype at the moment, but expected to go into production early next year.

To give you a sense of scale, the first generation Motorola RAZR was 13mm thin!

In addition, new advances in picture quality mean the next-gen of HDTV will look better than ever before:

• Toshiba Regza ZF – uses the same Cell processor found in the PS3 to upscale an existing TV signal to near-HD quality. The TV plays at 24fps, has a contrast ratio of 30,000:1, and will also play full HD (1080p) if you a suitable high def input. Toshiba would rather you didn’t use BluRay, and so their new TVs aim to provide BluRay-esque quality without the need for a BluRay player.
• LG Scarlet LG7000 – with super clear picture quality, the LG7000 features a response time of just 2.7ms,full-HD, and the ability to tweak its parameters to a “professional level”. Better still, it’ll come with Bluetooth, so you can listen to your programmes through Bluetooth headsets, or display photos on the TV from your phone or camera.

Video, Home theatre and DVD

Naturally, BluRay was all the rage this year, particularly after Toshiba dropped the competing HD-DVD technology.

There were many firsts, with competing manufacturers battling it out to shove BluRay into virtually any device in order to secure their own personal firsts.

Among the more impressive gadgets this year were the following:

• JVC NX-BD3 BluRay player with DLNA – the world’s first DLNA-equipped BluRay player,which means it’ll sync seamlessly with your PC and other DLNA-equipped devices such as cellphones and PMPs in order to share music, photos and videos. It also comes with an internal amp rated at 4x55W,and will pump out 200W of bass through its subwoofer.
• Sony Bravia BDV-IT1000 Blu-Ray home theatre system – finger-thin speakers and a devastating 700W of power, this new Blu-Ray home theatre system looks gorgeous and should be capabale of seriously upsetting your neighbours.
• Philips CinemaOne iPod speaker and DVD player (below) – combines a 1080p upscaling DivX-compatible DVD player iwth an iPod dock, so you can listen to yours tunes loudly without needing any extra gadgets.
• The Loewe network media center is a 32″ or 42″ TV with a whole host of internal gubbins that’ll suck up your video wherever it’s stored. Each TV has a built-in USB port, Ethernet port, WiFi and HD tuner, and a new model will be out in 2009 with a hard disk drive as well.

Super-smart Camcorders

BluRay wasn’t just evident in DVD players, either. Take a look at these camcorders coming soon.

• The Sanyo Xacti HD is the world’s camcorder that can record at 1080p (that’s full-HD)
• Hitachi DZ-BD7H, the world’s first BluRay camcorder. With a 30GB hard disk and BluRay recorder, you can record four hours of full HD video, and can even copy from the hard disk to the BluRay recorder internally without using a computer.

Hi-Fi

The Philips Streamium MCi-500H is a new Wi-Fi Hi-Fi designed to stream music from your PC and to other wireless speakers around your home.

With 50Wper channel output, it also comes with a USB connection and a 160GB hard drive for ripping music from CDs.

There wasn’t much in the way of Hi-Fi news at IFA, but that’s because all the hi-fi manufacturers will be presenting at the CEDIA event in a few days’ time.

Portable Audio

Of course, there was a seemingly endless stream of MP3 players, iPod docks and the like, but here are some of the highlights:

• Logitech Squeezebox Boom – the next-gen Squeezebox with its own wireless speakers that lets you stream your tunes to any music in the house. Comes with its own amp as well, so you don’t need to plug it into a HiFi.
• Sony Walkman S series – a 7.5mm thin MP3 player with 2″ LCD screen that also lets you watch content from the BBC’s iPlayer. Top Gear on your Walkman? At last!

Random oddness

As well as the usual lust-worthy gadgets, there were one or two other gadgets that made you wonder what their inventors were smoking thinking when they designed them:

• Compositor media streamer – Take a WiFi digital photo viewer. You know, the small LCD screens that wirelessly pull in pictures from your PC or from Flickr. Then give it the ability to play not just static photos like any old photo display, but er, movies as well! That’s what the Compositor Media Streamer will do for you! They want you to buy dozens and distribute them liberally around the house so you can have your very own set of unremitting attention hoovers wherever you look! Great guys, great idea!
• Samsung UbiSync digital photo frames – not quite so mad as the Compositor frames, the new Samsung UbiSync frames are wireless 8″ and 10″ photo frames with 1GB of memory and the ability to act as a secondary PC monitor. Set one up in your home office with a picture of your girlfriend next to your PC, then use it as a second screen when you’re working. OK, so it is as mad as the Compositor!

Summary

So there you have it – 16 of the most drool-worthy home entertainment gadgets coming up for 2009. Hope you’ve got your chequebooks ready (or maybe even your second mortgages!)

Note: This post is taking part in the ProBlogger writing competition, so feel free to check out all the other entrants.