A DIFFERENT APPROACH

Digital music storage made simple – that’s what Sony Giga Juke systems are all about. Announced in a press release yesterday, the new NAS-SC55PKE makes Giga Juke more flexible than ever. The system has hard disk storage and high-speed copying from its built-in CD player to the HDD. It has a dock for your iPod and you might want to use the built-in a radio tuner to record your favourite radio programs with the timer function

The NAS-SC55PKE is a complete multi-room system of music server and wireless player unit, able to deliver music to up to five zones – wirelessly. Wherever you are in your home, you can access the main server from the wireless players, and even listen to different songs in each of the five zones. Having a party with your friends? Just press the “Party Mode” button, and every room with a wireless player will play the same music at the same time. Of course interference and obstacles play a role here and could spoil the fun. Otherwise it's pretty cool.

Able to store up to 40,000 songs, the system can fill your entire home with tons of music. Ripping at up to 16x speed, a 60-minute CD can be copied in less than 4 minutes. It can also transfer files to portable players at up to 50x speed – that’s 74 minutes of music in just 90 seconds.

Thanks to its choice of Linear PCM, MP3, Window Media Audio or ATRAC compatibility, the unit can store a massive music collection, whether it’s from CD, radio, external sources such as vinyl, or a home PC. Automatic title labelling is provided using Gracenote’s music recognition technology and database, containing music data for music datas for approximately 350,000 albums. The ‘finger print recognition’ even analyses the character of tracks recorded from LP or any other analogue source, and tags the track/artist data from the built-in database.

Once you’ve loaded the NAS-SC55PKE with all your music, it comes into its own as the ultimate home ‘jukebox’. The x-DJ feature intelligently analyses tracks to categorise your music library into 27 different channels to suit any occasion – like ‘good morning’ for waking up, ‘party time’ for socialising, and ‘slow life’ to chill out in the evening. While a song is playing you can also ‘surf’ through tracks stored on the HDD at the touch of a button. Choose ‘artist’ in Music Surfin’ mode it will pull all tracks from the same artist into a playlist. Similarly, choosing ‘year’ will search for all tracks released in the same era and ‘mood’ will look for all tracks with the same musical taste.

The main system has 100W of award-winning S-MASTER digital amplification, and comes complete with sleek two-way speakers with soft dome tweeter for precise mid-high frequencies and resonant bass duct for powerful & rich bass sound. Meanwhile the wireless player has a wooden cabinet for natural sound, 20W amplification and built-in stereo speakers with long stroke duct for powerful bass, so you can enjoy your digital music in hi-fi quality sound all around the house.

  Sony Europe