The Limited Edition System amplifier.
(Credit: EMP Tek)High-end audio can be expensive, but there are deals to be had.
Take a gander at EMP Tek's nifty Limited Edition System that goes for $595. It's a three-piece affair with a stereo tube integrated amplifier and a pair of sweet-looking bookshelf speakers.
Call me jaded, but I've heard a bunch of iPod speaker systems in that price range that sounded like glorified boom boxes. And since most of them are single-box systems they don't do much in the way of stereo separation. Yes, they make bass, but it's always bloated, thick, and boomy bass. Impressive to some at first, but its not what you'd call hi-fi sound. These iPod systems' power amp wattage is rarely specified or it's wildly exaggerated. For $600 you should be able to get a decent sounding system, and there's no such thing as a decent sounding iPod speaker for that kind of money.
The EMP Tek Limited Edition System is something else again. Its 40-watt-per-channel rating seems about right. Small enough to fit on a desktop, it's just 6.6 inches wide, 4.5 high, and 10.25 deep, and the amp has three inputs. Two are minijacks, so you can plug your iPod/MP3 player in, and there's a stereo RCA input you might use to pump the sound of your DVD or Blu-ray player through the system. The amp's two tubes are backlit with blue LEDs, which look extra cool. The amp weighs 8 pounds.
... Read moreI had a charter family membership Seattle's Experience Music Project or EMP, which opened in 2000. But after a couple years, I gave it up. The exhibits didn't change enough to warrant a lot of repeat visits, our periodic out-of-town guests had all been at least once, and the promise of early alerts about live shows at the museum never seemed to come through. (The one show I really wanted to see, the Television reunion in 2001, was sold out before I was ever informed about it.)
With a teenaged niece in town and my daughter just getting old enough to enjoy the museum experience, we decided to rejoin yesterday. After facing a few years of low attendance, the museum has made a lot of positive changes, like lowering prices for memberships and daily passes and offering free admission on one evening per month.
As part of this revamp, they killed MEG. Also known as the Museum Experience Guide, MEG was a portable device about the size of a portable CD player with a laser scanner, headphones, and an LCD screen. Visitors would point the scanner at a point on the wall and hear information about the exhibit and maybe some relevant music--for example, famous guitarists like Vernon Reid shredding one of the museum's rare guitars. Nobody loved MEG: they were awkward to carry and hard to figure out, and I always ended up putting mine down somewhere halfway through my visit.
Their replacement? iPods with jukeboxes of music from featured artists like Nirvana and Jimi Hendrix. Given that Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen established the EMP, you might have expected them to replace the MEG (which was built on Windows CE) with a Zune. But no--even though the EMP has held Zune-sponsored events and even had a few Zunes on display for a while, they've apparently decided to go with the industry standard MP3 player instead.
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