Featured Reviews

Pioneer is betting that "serious" dancers won't be able to live without one of their new STEEZ portable music players. Equipped with dance-specific features like tempo control, 8-Beat skip control, manual cue setting, and an auto Dance Battle mode, what "serious" dancer could live without a STEEZ? Powered by either the mains or batteries, you can Bring It wherever you want, even to Beat Street. Now, you don't have to set a time and date for a dance-off; with STEEZ, you can get your groove on wherever you want. We just want you do to it a little farther from our lawn.

Given the wide variety of offerings on the market, we might have expected Paradigm to lean on their name and fans to sell much higher priced offerings. Even at double the price, we could see the Paradigm SHIFT earbuds selling. At these price points, and with this level of performance, the Paradigm SHIFT earbuds are sure to be a hit. If you are looking for a pair of earbuds, you'd be crazy not to put these on your short list.

The last time we touched an AudioEngine A5 speaker was back in 2006. Now 5-1/2 years ago we felt that the A5's had, and I quote "superb build quality, finish, and high-end sound quality". Well, a couple things are different - but mostly not much has changed. First of all, if you loved the AudioEngine A5 speakers, you can still get them - in fact, they're $50 less then they were when we reviewed them. The A5+ speakers, however are more or less a model that is designed for multimedia or active monitor use. They lack the odd top USB charger of the A5, instead moving it to the back. They also dropped the auxiliary power outlet, which was perfect for the popular Apple Airport adapter. What they added was a pair of RCA inputs - and they made the RCA outputs variable - so you can connect them up to a subwoofer and get extension well below 50Hz, which is about what you can expect from the A5+ speakers on their own. For multimedia speakers, the extension of the AudioEngine A5+'s is going to give you some excellent real-world low end not found on most other 2.0 systems. But like we said - add their S8 sub or a similar model and it gets even better.

The Velodyne vPulse In-Ear Headphones look to be a pretty interesting offering from the, traditionally, subwoofer company. With built-in iDevice and Android functionality, you won't have to remove them to answer your calls. Since they are so new, you can only pre-order them from the Velodyne website. But you will save $10 over the $89 asking price. Frankly, for less than $90, many headphone aficionados would consider these an impulse buy. We're going to have to reserve our final judgement until we can get a pair in our hands... or ears, rather.

While marketed for Apple products, the XtremeMac Tango Bar will work just fine with your PC. Powered and fed by USB, the sound bar features stereo channels and dual passive radiators. The key here, of course, is price. For a buck less than a C-note, the XtremeMac Tango Bar is pretty much an impulse buy for those purchasing a new computer from the Apple Store. While they haven't published any sort of performance data, the passive radiators alone guarantee that consumers are going to be impressed with the sound. With an additional input for your non-iDevice MP3 player, and headphone and subwoofer outputs, the XtremeMac Tango Bar, at the very least, is giving users options.

At $300, the Onkyo CS-345 looks to be well priced and featured for the market. The integrated iPod/iPhone dock will appeal to many and the stereo input will appease the rest. Video output from your docked iDevice is a nice feature for students looking for an easy way to get new content in their dorms. The subwoofer output shows how Onkyo understands that this type of customer is likely to be looking for additional bass before they need additional inputs. The CS-345 may be limited, but it has just about everything a college dorm, bedroom, or office needs.

The NAD VISO 1 has a lot of technology that lovers of NAD will absolutely care about. The high end DACs and proprietary amplifiers are sure to impress even neophytes. But where the VISO 1 falls flat is in overall connectivity and functionality. Sure, top-of-line Bluetooth and a direct digital connection to your iDevice is impressive, as is a component video output, but, with only a single additional connection, we're left wanting. For the $700 price tag, we would like to see, at the very least, some sort of wireless connectivity to the Internet for streaming content from connected computers or online services. We're hoping that the other entries into the VISO line from NAD feature a few more...well...features.

The Energy Power EM-2.1 Multimedia Speaker System is going to sell on two features - the name and the price. At $99.99, the name of Energy behind the Power EM-2.1 is going to push this speaker system into the black. Simply because they are priced low enough that most of the rest of the competition is some no-name brand. Honestly, if we only had a C-note to spend, we'd take a hard look at these as well. At least we think they will listen to them before shipping while those no-name brands most likely just have the cheapest drivers shoved inside the cheapest enclosure with no thought at all to sound quality.

Libratone markets their new Live and Lounge AirPlay speakers as "Scandinavia in your living room." Well, apparently this isn't the Ikea Scandinavia but the more expensive, cashmere-wrapped Scandinavia. The speakers do boast not only the ability to stream from iDevices via Apple's AirPlay, but also tailor that sound via Libratone's dedicated app. Will it sound $700 worth of good for the portable Live speaker or $1300 worth of good for the larger, Lounge? We don't know. The real question in our minds is how much better will the $100 cashmere wrap make the speakers sound?