Ears On

Consumers junk millions of remote controls each year. But 20 percent of remotes deemed defective can be returned to service with a simple reset routine, according to MrRemoteControls.com. Here are the instructions verbatim:

Complaints about scratched iPod nanos are giving way to solutions from Apple and other parties. First there are those three Apple-branded iPod cases in Italian leather. Tug a little ribbon and your iPod slides out gracefully. Cases are available for the 60GB, 30GB, and nano. The $99 pricetag may raise an eyebrow among the hoi i-polloi but clearly Apple is lunging for the carriage trade here. Meanwhile NYC retailer J&R is selling iPod nanos that have been put through a custom hardening procedure described this way: "Each custom colored iPod goes through a thorough process of cleaning, painting, protection and curing before it is ready for use. The protection comprises of the unique X2 scratch resistant liquid plastic coating. It's applied right after the painting process and cured with ultraviolet light, to achieve superior scratch resistance and clarity. The final product has a finish that won't fade or crack!" The price for a treated 2GB nano is $265 or $66 more than list.

The maker of the world's most deliriously successful music player offers these words of advice: "If you expose your ears to excessive sound pressure, you can harm those small hair cells in your ears." Whether this has anything to do with the class-action lawsuit filed in Louisiana alleging hearing damage from iPods is, of course, just so much irresponsible speculation. According to my colleagues at Stereophile, a recent poll indicates hearing loss among the young is a real problem. What is certain is that Apple has announced a firmware upgrade that sets a top volume level deemed safe with Apple's supplied iPod earbuds and other products with similar sensitivity ratings.

High-performance audio's long, slow decline is officially a crisis. The latest figures from the Consumer Electronics Association say that portable audio devices now outsell components—"for the first time in history," as This Week In Consumer Electronics reported. Put portable, home, and car audio together and the audio industry grew a total of 29 percent in 2005. But that includes an 85 percent hike in sales of portables, four percent growth in car audio, and a decline of 16 percent in the good-sounding stuff that sits on your rack, if you still have a rack. You can blame paradigm shifts, generational changes, i-everything, blabbity blabbity blah, but there's a smoking gun here, and I'll talk about it tomorrow.

Apple Computer doesn't like France's pending copyright reform. Though widely viewed as a blow against the binding of iTunes purchases to iPods—horreur!—the law actually would require all downloads to be compatible with all devices. An Apple spokesperson equated this with "state-sponsored piracy," and your federal government has chimed in with cabinet-level agreement: "Any time that we believe that intellectual property rights are being violated, we need to speak up and in this case, the company is taking the initiative," Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez told CNBC. What makes the situation so ironic is that just a few years ago, the same federal government (well, almost the same) was energetically litigating against Microsoft for binding Internet Explorer to Windows. In similar spirit, the European Union is about to hit Microsoft with a big fine for binding the Windows Media Player to the OS. Since no one else is asking the question, I will: Why should there be one antitrust standard for Microsoft and a totally different one for Apple? The French, at least, are proposing to level the playing field in an increasingly lucrative download market.