Radio for the well-connected

Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO – Internet radio promises to transform home stereo systems into the widest of wide-band radios, pumping music, talk and news from an infinite number of broadcast stations into our living rooms at the touch of a button.

Sonicbox ($99.95) attempts to fulfill that promise, but it’s hampered by a simple fact: The vast majority of households still connect to the Internet through slow dial-up modems.

The unit from Sonicbox Inc. is actually several little purple boxes, which relay Internet broadcast programs from a personal computer’s sound card and wirelessly transmit the audio into a home stereo system.

It works like this: Sonicbox’s base unit and transmitter connect to the computer; a receiver is wired to the stereo. A wireless remote unit controls the volume and changes stations.

Sonicbox is designed to save the hassle of walking back and forth from the comfortable room with the nice stereo to the computer room littered with Doritos bags.

Instead of double-clicking your way through online broadcasters on your computer’s desktop, you simply store your favorites and access them with the wireless remote unit.

Sonicbox can also transmit playlists of MP3 music files stored on a computer hard drive.

Getting started is a snap on Windows 98 and Windows 2000 (it’s not Mac compatible).

The installation CD-ROM with the “iM tuner” software launches quickly and walks you through the process of connecting all the purple boxes. The remote unit has a nice wireless communication range to other components, so it’s easy to adjust the volume or change stations with the unit’s tuning knob.

But tuning is perhaps a misnomer.

You’re not actually tuning into a radio broadcast in the traditional sense, but to the signal created by the Sonicbox transmitter. Reception will only be as good as the broadcaster’s selected bit-rate, and further diminished by a small loss of quality thanks to the transmitted signal.

Sonicbox is a winner for those who want to pump Internet broadcasts throughout their homes while putting a little more distance between themselves and the computer desktop. The iM software tuner also comes with nifty online preset stations including alternative, blues and police band broadcasts.

But Sonicbox really leaves one salivating for more.

If you don’t have a DSL cable modem, which is at least 10 times faster than dial-up modem connections, you’ll want one.

Sonicbox is the first such product to hit the U.S. market, and could really take off in a broadband future where high-speed connections are ubiquitous and the fuzzy quality of dial-up modem broadcasts become ancient history.

Other manufacturers are set to launch products similar to Sonicbox by year’s end, and the Internet radio of tomorrow will certainly bypass the desktop altogether, funneling sound directly to Internet-enabled stereos.