OTHER TECH

Many companies showed HD Radio receivers at the Consumer Electronics Show in January: Harman Kardon, Kenwood, and Yamaha displayed prototypes for home use, while Alpine, Delphi, JVC, Kenwood, Sanyo, and Visteon showed car units. And the Korean company Personal Telecom showed a pocket-sized personal portable. But few of these companies have released details about their HD plans since that initial splash, and none have announced prices, no doubt because production hasn't geared up yet since the FCC approved the system late last year.

Kenwood will offer the widest choice: eight of its car stereo head units (due out in early spring) will be "HD ready," equipped to work with the KTC-HR100 trunk-mounted tuner box (rumored to be about $350 and due in mid summer). Input and output jacks on the tuner will enable the use of several trunk-mounted Kenwood music sources, including a Sirius satellite-radio tuner, a CD changer, and the Music Keg hard-disk player.

Visteon radios have long used the kind of digital signal processing technology that HD Radio reception calls for and will use a fourth-generation chip in its first HD Radio model. It will appear next year in an unnamed European car, making that the first car available with HD Radio reception.

Delphi's double-DIN head unit is also likely to be sold through car manufacturers-most of its head units are. No details, yet. All Alpine will say is "wait until '04." And the other car stereo makers mentioned above are quiet as clams-as are the makers of home stereo gear.

Personal Telecom did, however, release a spec sheet on its HDR 201 personal portable, adapted from the DR 201 it now sells abroad for Eureka 147 listeners. The unit shown at CES received analog as well as digital AM and FM and could play MP3 and Windows Media Audio music files from its own 64-megabyte memory or from removable Secure Digital or MultiMediaCard memory modules. - I.B.