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Gyration Air Music Remote

Michael Brown — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:00:00 -0600

The Gyration Air Music Remote is absolutely awesome when it comes to controlling the cursor of a home-theater PC. But this device doesn’t deliver on its bigger promise to be a high-end universal remote control.

Like all Gyration remotes, this one uses a gyroscope to determine its own position in three-dimensional space. With its position established, the remote translates those coordinates to move a mouse cursor on the two-dimensional plane of a computer screen. Hold the remote in front of you, push the primary button, move your wrist up, and the cursor moves up. Point the remote to the left and the cursor moves the to the left -- and so on. Buttons to the right and left of the primary button perform the same functions as the left and right buttons of a conventional mouse.

The device doesn’t need a surface to operate on, it’s extremely responsive, the required wrist movements fell very natural, and the learning curve needed to achieve precision cursor control is as flat as a pancake. All these factors make it superior to both a wireless mouse (which requires a flat surface) and a D-pad (which is much more difficult to control with any level of precision). However, all that said, you need more than a mouse to control a PC, even if only to enter URLs into a web browser. And while the Air Music has a telephone-style alpha-numeric keyboard, it can send alpha characters only to Windows Media Center. (The manufacturer sells the Air Music bundled with a wireless keyboard for $230.)

Without a keyboard’s Control or Shift key, for example, it’s impossible to select multiple items in a window or list. And you can’t easily perform click-and-drag operations—including manipulating a scroll bar—unless you either lock the cursor into its active state, or manage to squeeze two buttons at the same time (a feat that’s nearly impossible to do with one hand, and merely "awkward as hell" to manage with two).

The backlit, 1.75-inch, 160x104-pixel LCD can display playlists, album and artist names, and track titles, but these music display features are compatible only with iTunes and Windows Media Player. The tiny, monochromatic display is decidedly unimpressive for anyone who’s used a Sonos or Squeezebox Duet controller (or the free iPhone apps for either of those devices).

The remote uses RF to control the PC. A Bluetooth connection would have been preferred, but at least it does use the 2.4GHz frequency band, and it delivered very good range. The Air Music can also be programmed to send IR commands to other devices. It’s limited, however, to controlling a set-top box, an aux device (e.g., your A/V receiver), and a TV. And there are other shortcomings for a universal remote this costly: You can’t program it via your PC, it uses four disposable AAA batteries (we expected a rechargeable power source), button backlighting must be turned on manually (the button is hard to find in the dark—the device needs a light sensor), and there’s no support for other RF protocols, such as ZigBee or Z-Wave.

We’d like the Air Music Remote a whole lot more if Gyration eliminated every feature except cursor and media-player control and whacked the price tag down to about $50.

Niles Audio RCA-HT Remote Control Anywhere Kit

Michael Brown — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 16:33:11 -0600

You can take one of two approaches with the gear in your home-theater system: Put everything on display, or you hide your components in a cabinet or closet. If you prefer discretion over exhibitionism, Niles Audio’s Remote Control Anywhere kit lets you to control all your infrared-controlled components no matter where you’ve stashed them.

The $270 kit—which consists of a master connection hub, one master sensor, five infrared emitters, and 50 feet of Cat5 cable (to extend the master sensor’s 10-foot cable)—is extremely easy to deploy: Simply glue the emitters in front of the IR receivers on your components, plug their cables into the control module, glue the surface-mount master sensor somewhere discrete, and plug in the power adapter. Pre-drilled holes in the flanges of the control module’s metal housing renders the device easy to mount on most any surface.

The master sensor can be hidden in an inconspicuous spot. Niles also offers other types of sensors that can be placed on a tabletop or in the ceiling.

The master sensor has a receiving angle of 60 degrees off axis (horizontal and vertical) at 20 feet, which enabled us to tuck the receiver in a very inconspicuous spot between two cabinet doors. We attached the emitters to our A/V receiver, satellite set-top box, DVD player, and VCR and had the system up and running in the media room at Maximum PC Lab North inside of 15 minutes. We spent most of that time finding the sweet spots on our components’ IR receivers.

The master IR sensor has a green LED (to the right of the sensor lens) that informs you when your system is powered on; unfortunately, actually making use of it requires the purchase of a $15 accessory.

If your A/V receiver has provisions for a second zone (meaning it can play audio and/or video—either from the same source or from an independent one—in a second room), the connection hub can accommodate a second master sensor. This would enable you to manage all your gear from a second room. Unfortunately, the second master sensor is not included in the kit. We’re guessing this is because Niles offers a variety of sensors (wall mount, tabletop, ceiling mount, flush mount, wall mount with volume-control knob, and so on), but none of them are cheap. The identical surface-mount model, for example, carries a street price of $117.

The surface-mount master sensors are equipped with a green LED that glows to inform you that your A/V receiver is powered on. Here again, however, enabling this feature requires optional equipment. In this case, a $15 power adapter that you plug into the switched A/C outlet on your receiver.

The kit includes five IR blasters that you'll need to glue to the components you wish to control.

We don’t usually discuss a product’s user manual, but we’re making an exception in this case. Although Niles does a great deal of business with custom installers, this seemingly simple product comes with an extremely thorough 24-page user manual that covers installation in both new and existing construction.

If you don’t need the second-zone feature this kit has to offer, Niles’ model RCA-SM is about $50 cheaper. Heck, you could avoid buying the kit entirely by putting a glass door on your entertainment center, but where’s the fun in that?

Keyspan TuneView for iPod

Michael Brown — Thu, 17 May 2007 18:40:30 -0500

We’ll overlook the TuneView’s biggest shortcoming—the total absence of physical support for an iPod connected to it—because it comes with a remote control that eliminates any need to manipulate the iPod while it’s docked.

The docking-station component of the TuneView is as rudimentary as they come: It’s equipped with 1/8-inch stereo and S-video outputs and a USB port that’s used to either sync the iPod to your PC or power the dock and charge your iPod—but you can’t do both at the same time. Power is supplied by Keyspan’s weird-but-cool USB power adapter. (Plug the adapter into an AC outlet, plug a USB cable into the adapter, and you can charge the battery in any device that accepts power over USB.)

The remote control, on the other hand, is pretty slick: It’s capable of not only controlling a docked iPod, but also receiving data from the iPod. It features a 1.4-inch LCD that is capable of displaying most of the information your iPod knows about the music stored on it. Using the remote, you can browse your music collection by song, genre, artist, album, and playlist as if you were holding the iPod. And since it uses the 2.4GHz band, there’s no line-of-sight requirement.

The remote’s passive-matrix display doesn’t deliver the ultrafast response times or high contrast we take for granted in active-matrix displays, but it’s good enough for this application. Hand us a remote with a built-in display, however, and we’re bound to compare it to the Sonos Digital Music System—and to the iPod itself, for that matter (pair your iPod with a Bluetooth transceiver, and the iPod becomes a remote in and of itself). The TuneView suffers in these comparisons: The fact that the remote can’t display album art is more the fault of Apple than it is of Keyspan, but the buttons feel plasticky and cheap. That’s not what we expect from a $180 device; even so, the remote renders this one of the best docking solutions we’ve tested.

Etymotic Research ety8 Bluetooth Earbuds

Michael Brown — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 13:38:44 -0600

Thanks to Apple’s ubiquitous advertising, you can walk around town with wires hanging out of your ears without getting strange looks from passersby. Etymotic Research’s ety8 Bluetooth earphones shorten the wires, but these anything-but-discreet earbuds are guaranteed to draw a few sets of eyeballs your way.

If you don’t mind the attention, you’ll get to enjoy a great set of noise-isolating earphones that don’t need to be tethered to your iPod. The ety8s aren’t entirely wireless—a shoelace-like cord links the left and right modules—but they use Bluetooth technology for wireless two-way communication via a small transceiver plugged into the iPod’s docking port. The lanyard is just long enough to allow you to turn your head without tugging either module, and when you’re not listening to music, you can drape the ety8s over your neck.

Five tiny buttons on the right module control the iPod’s volume up/down, track selection, play/pause, and previous/next track functions. As small as the buttons are, it took us just moments to blindly locate them and memorize the function of each one—the all-important pause button was the easiest to master. And each button press updates the iPod’s display. The more we used the ety8s, the more we appreciated the convenience of going wireless, whether we were bundling up for a cold-weather outdoor excursion, working out indoors on an exercise bike, or just sitting at our desks.

Only one aspect of the system gave us pause: The transceiver you plug into the iPod is small (1 inch high by 1.5 inches wide) and sturdy, but friction is the only force that keeps it mated to your iPod. We’re just unsure of how well it and the iPod’s docking port will stand up to repeated jostling and knocking around inside a jacket pocket.

The ety8s come with a wide selection of ear tips and do a fabulous job of blocking out background noise; more importantly, they sounded marvelous with everything from Mozart symphonies to Paul Thorn’s wry, whiskey-soaked blues. Yeah, they’re a little geeky, but they’re definitely worth suffering a few stares for.

Month Reviewed: February 2007
Verdict: 8
URL: www.etymotic.com