OTHER TECH

MUSIC PERFORMANCE This sophisticated system put me in the mood for some sophisticated music, so I loaded a new DVD-Audio disc of Mahler's Symphony No. 1 with the Utah Symphony Orchestra conducted by Maurice Abravanel. The 1974 recording captured a great performance. The system isn't designed to play the disc's high-resolution tracks, but the Dolby Digital mix was still impressive. I could hear a good amount of detail in the massive orchestra, and the acoustic space of the Mormon Tabernacle was vivid in the surrounds. The long delay and reverberation added a sense of grandeur to this "Titan" of a symphony. In case you have stereo favorites you want to hear in surround, Bose provides its own Videostage 5 surround sound processing to synthesize multichannel playback even from mono source material.

Of course, the gee-whiz factor in the Lifestyle 38 is uMusic. To test this, I ripped a bunch of CDs. Getting your favorite music into the system is a cinch. Load the CD, press Store, and a few minutes later you're ready to load your next disc. Coldplay's A Rush of Blood to the Head, which runs close to an hour, ripped in about 4 minutes.

When ripping is complete, the media center accesses its internal Gracenote CDDB database (covering 500,000 CDs) and identifies the album's title, artist, and genre, track titles, and so on. No problem with the Coldplay album. Trying something more esoteric, I loaded Lionel Hampton's Swingsation . It found that one, too. If an album isn't in the database, you can manually enter info using the remote and a character grid on your TV. Also, Bose issues quarterly CDs to update the database. Once my music was on the hard drive, it was easy to find any album or song, searching by album title, genre, artist, or track.

The coolest thing about uMusic is that it tracks your preferences so the system can play stored music with similar profiles when you select the uMusic playback mode. While I listened, I could indicate - using buttons on the remote - my strong like or dislike for a song, ask it to skip a tune, tell it to focus on more songs like that one, or ask it to play all the tracks on that album. Based on that input, uMusic then automatically prioritized my music - essentially assigning probabilities that a given selection will be played in the uMusic mode.

But what if you like classical and your wife likes jazz? No problem - uMusic has nine presets that can be assigned to different users, or you can use them yourself for party music, workout music, whatever. And you can select two uMusic presets for simultaneous playback in different rooms.

The uMusic system did a good job of playing the music I identified as my favorite type. I stored CDs ranging from Madonna to Mozart, but repeatedly told the system how much I liked Philip Glass. It dutifully gave his works a higher playback probability. Madonna, on the other hand, only rarely got the call. The system also had no problem sending different streams to my main and remote room.

Most important, I was happy with the sound of the stored MP3 files - pretty much what I would expect from original CDs encoded at a reasonably high bit rate. It wasn't quite CD quality but close to it. The highs were slightly dull, but there were no obvious distortions, and dynamic peaks seemed a tad softened. The stereo image was also slightly less clear than on the original CDs. I wouldn't want to store 200 of my favorite discs in the media center and then throw them away. But I'd be perfectly comfortable using its hard drive as a convenient way of playing music. After all, if I wanted full fidelity, I could always load the CD.

BOTTOM LINE The Lifestyle 38 system is a fine example of how technology inexorably evolves and improves. It builds on the essential features and quality of the previous Lifestyle home theater systems but adds the advantages of hard-disk music storage and instant access. Interestingly, the uMusic features tip the balance of this home theater system back from video to audio - something music lovers will surely appreciate. Bose has shown that a hard-drive music library can be managed with complete simplicity, and that even with 200 hours of music tucked inside, your favorites will never be far away.