Kenwood has a new desktop audio system intended to be connected for portable audio players. "Hi-Fi" sounds familiar, but oh well.

MD isn't dead. Kenwood, JVC, and Sony all have new MD players. We'll first take a look at the "DMC-V55" and "DMC-V33" from Kenwood.

If you're against the iPod and didn't want to get that Neon Genesis Evangelion Edition iPod from a while back, you're in luck -- Chara-Ani has announced an Eva version of Kenwood's "HD20GA7" portable audio player. It comes pre-loaded with all 112 songs from the animated series. More details inside.

Remember when we said Kenwood would be introducing portable digital audio products? And we said we'd be sure to cover it?

Well, Kenwood DID introduce portable audio products, and we're surely covering it. I'm not real impressed, given you need dedicated software to actually transfer songs, but this new-fangled "Scroller" could be interesting to play with. By all means, read o­n.

According to this Impress Watch article, Kenwood will be entering the portable digital audio market by Spring of 2005. They will be introducing both hard drive-based and flash memory-based players. We'll be sure to cover the product announcement when it comes out.

That is all.

I had heard about Windows Automotive, and you probably have too, but I basically ignored it. Well, this article got my attention -- Kenwood's "HDM-777" is not o­nly a hard drive navigation system, but it also features a DVD drive. It doesn't stop there; it also uses the internet to download new data and even connect to a home server.

This is pretty straightforward. Since it doesn't have internal rechargable batteries, you're o­n your own. But o­ne interesting feature of the player is that you can use either 2 or 4 AA batteries - and you can even mix and match types of batteries, such as Alkaline and NiMH.

I didn't expect to see this happen. Kenwood is releasing this networkable AV amp in October that supports the playback of MPEG-1/2 and XviD for video, as well as MP3, WMA, and OggVorbis for audio.
The reason I'm a bit suprised is because I didn't really expect to see major manufacturers offer support for MPEG-4 based compression formats this early in the game.
But it is expensive - about $1,000 USD. Is this normal for a Kenwood amplifier?

With two 16cm subwoofers in each speaker, these probably produce just the right amount of bass for a Japanese room.