Running with a stack of my favorite CDs compressed into a player no larger than a deck of cards, I set a personal best on the trail around the Central Park Reservoir.
A DVD player is already a terrific bargain - an inexpensive black box that can play discs full of razor-sharp images, immersive surround sound, and fascinating extras. But what if you could wed a DVD player with another popular entertainment device like, say, a TV, VCR, or game console? Well, it's already being done.
It's the week before Christmas. You've taken a good look at your extended family, gotten all of the naughty and nice stuff out of the way, and finally arrived at a list of who's deserving of a little holiday cheer. But you're drawing a big blank when it comes to little Susie, big brother Ned, and jolly Uncle Phil.
When Dr. Amar Bose visited the magazine where I worked in the early 1990s, he teased staffers by hiding under a cloth the source of the luxurious-sounding music filling the room. Moments later he revealed that it was actually emanating from an unassuming clock radio. Since then, the Bose Wave radio has landed on countless tabletops and nightstands.
Stroll through any large store that sells audio and video equipment, and it's mind-numbing how similar the products in each category look. If you close your eyes, point to any receiver or DVD player, and guess "black and boxy," you'll almost certainly be right.
Conventional wisdom dictates that there are good reasons why A/V design is so homogeneous.
Backward-compatibility can come at the expense of innovation, as we learned from the failure of the Digital Compact Cassette in the early '90s. The DCC format enabled a new generation of hardware both to record digital tape cassettes and to play standard analog cassettes.
