All In-car Feeds

Logitech Wireless Headphones

tech.co.uk staff — 1206781213

Much as we love our iPods with the distinctive white earphones, something's missing - or rather, we wish something was missing. It's the earphone cord. It snags, it gets in the way and it's old-fashioned in this modern wireless age. But what if we could cut that cord?

Depending on your personal preference and tolerance for behind-the-neck headphones, Logitech's Wireless Headphones might be your ticket to unwired aural bliss. Or, they could give you a dull pain from having too much weight pressing against your ears. You see, because they are battery-powered, they may be a bit too heavy to sit comfortably on some heads.

On the plus side, these 'phones are simple to operate. A transmitter parks atop your 'Pod, and syncs with the phones on your head when you press both units' sync button - a blue light indicates the connection. This is all very well, except that the new fifth-generation video-capable iPod (see our review on pages 84 and 85) doesn't have the remote port that the headphones rely on anymore, which means you won't be able to use it with these headphones. It's the same story with the iPod nano, but previous iPod models including the iPod mini are fine.

Pleasingly, the controls on the headphones themselves are nicely accessible. On the right-side earpiece are buttons for raising and lowering the volume and skipping between or scrolling through tracks - they're smartly arranged and are simple to use. The transmitter and phones both sport an internal rechargeable battery (charger included), which lasted about as long as our year-old iPod mini's eight-hour charge.

These phones don't crank loud enough or fit securely enough for any decent level of head banging, but for playing nice in the office - without possibly falling off every time you get up - these headphones deliver. And if you're lucky, wearing them won't hurt too much, although you might get some funny looks from passersby who mistake you for an air traffic controller. Niko Coucouvanis

Navman N20

tech.co.uk staff — 1205596736

The N20 (£250 inc. VAT) is a mid-range satnav device from Navman. Although it comes with a reasonable price, it's far from stripped of features.

At just 23mm in depth and with rounded edges, the N20 slips comfortably into small bags and coat pockets. The design is simple, finished in hard-wearing grey plastic, with chrome touches.

A 3.5-inch touch screen is in place, and addresses or full eight-digit postcodes are entered using an onscreen Qwerty keyboard. You'll also find a number of useful hardware buttons, offering volume, a return to the main menu, and a nearest petrol station and parking search.

The N20 comes with directions for 21 European countries pre-installed. There's 64MB of system memory, and maps are stored on 512MB of flash-based ROM. The maps are clear, bright and easy to use, with a night mode included.

You'll find NavPix technology in place, allowing you to download photographs of famous landmarks and destinations from www.navman.com.

A SiRF Star III GPS module is at the heart of the device, offering the most up-to-date technology possible. We found satellites were located quickly, and the signal remained consistent.

Directions turned out to be accurate, and the N20 was quick to react if we strayed off the route. An extensive points-of-interest list makes it easy to find anything you need on the way.

Offering plenty for your money, the Navman N20 is one of the best mid-range GPS devices we've seen. Usability is second to none, and the amount of features belies its price.

Medion GoPal PNA470

tech.co.uk staff — 1205484610

Medion's GoPal PNA470 is the firm's new top-of-the-range satellite navigation system. As you'd rightly expect from a GPS system that costs nearly £300, it comes preloaded with maps covering a huge geographical area.

You could start off in Andorra, drive through Liechtenstein, take in Sweden and tour the Czech Republic safe in the knowledge the PNA470 can get you safely back to Pratts Bottom (near Bromley) if the need arises.

The PNA470 has the TMC traffic master system that picks up information about jams, so you can avoid bank holiday traffic.

When the device detects road congestion, it can be set to navigate around it. The information is broadcast on an FM frequency and, as such, you need another aerial. This isn't uncommon among GPS devices but it's still a pain - the aerial is a long wire and reflects annoyingly in the windscreen. We also found picking up a TMC signal quite difficult.

When you're on the road, the Medion's basic features work admirably well. Lesser machines can only search for four, but this allows you to enter all seven characters of a postcode, which increases the precision of your search. The machine's display is clear and there are useful touches like a graphical bar showing the distance to a junction.

So far so good. And then it comes to the machine's text-to-speech system. This is a system designed to read out place names as you approach locations key to your journey. In theory, this feature can be a real bonus; TomTom's 910 has the system and it works beautifully, sounding almost human.

The PNA470 does less well. Its system sounds purely synthesised and makes a poor job of pronouncing place names: Tow-kes-bury for Tewkesbury and Sow Pit Lane to Saw Pit Lane.

Picking on the Medion's pronunciation isn't just an academic criticism. Working out what the machine is trying to say is an unwanted distraction when you're going 70mph on the M5.

Despite its poor speech system, the PNA470 is a solid machine. Sadly, though, it's a few quid more than the TomTom 910. With that in mind, the 910 retains our choice recommendation as the best GPS navigation system around.

Medion GoPal PNA460

tech.co.uk staff — 1204819157

Budget electronic manufacturer Medion, a company that sells its products through supermarkets, is attempting to take on TomTom in the satellite navigation market. The Medion GoPal PNA460 (£199 inc. VAT) is a mid-range GPS device, and offers mapping for the UK, Ireland and Western Europe.

The 4.3-inch widescreen display is larger than that found on most rivals at this price point, which leaves no room on the front for hardware buttons. This makes navigating the menu a slower process than with rival products - and key features, such as volume, have to be adjusted via the touchscreen. We did find the interface simple and easy to use, however.

The 480 x 272-pixel touchscreen is bright and we found it easy to see, even in direct sunlight. Addresses or full postcodes are entered using an onscreen Qwerty keyboard. A stylus is provided, although we found this was mostly redundant thanks to large onscreen buttons.

A SiRF Star III GPS module provides an accurate location, although we found it a little slow to find satellites initially. The maps are provided by Navteq, and are bright and colourful. Directions were easy to follow and accurate, and the perspective of the maps can be changed from 2D to 3D.

Points of interest are included - such as petrol stations and banks, and there's also a Berlitz guide for the major European cities. This provides a more in-depth guide, although it's a shame information is not included for more than 50 cities.

It's not the most feature-packed device we've seen - there's no Bluetooth, and there's also no Traffic Message Channel, so you won't get warnings about congestion, although speed camera warnings are present.

However, while the GoPal isn't the most comprehensive sat- nav device we've tested, there's a lot on offer for your money. It's accurate, easy to use, and the large screen makes it a compelling choice.

Griffin iTrip Auto

tech.co.uk staff — 1203427073

From this month, radio transmitters for iPods will be legal in the UK. Finally, the powers that be, who had been sticking to the letter of the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949 for the past, well, 57 years, realised that perhaps the Act hadn't considered technology where individuals could transmit tunes from personal digital music playersto their own radios.

Now, after some blinding bureaucratic pencil sharpening, transmitting your own mini radio station from an iPod is finally allowed!

The technology isn't new, of course - anyone flying to the States or Asia could have picked up an iTrip and returned home to broadcast the hours away, albeit behind the bike sheds or with the curtains drawn. iPod owners in the UK have just been waiting a long time for legality!

The devices - a Tsunami wave of which are about to hit these shores - transmit your tunes to any frequency between 87.9 and 107.9MHz. You set the frequency on the LCD screen and then tune your dial to your iTrip's channel. This way, you won't clash with other shows on the airwaves.

The controller also provides volume buttons. Playback quality is reasonable over short distances, but it should be noted that this isn't meant to be an audiophile device. The one place where it works really well is in your car, where you can get your tunes pumping without fiddling about with cables and without the need for a cassette player. It will accommodate any iPod with a dock connector.

One fault with the original iTrip was the drain it took out of your iPod battery. The iTrip Auto gets around this, as it's also a charger - powering your iPod using a standard cigarette lighter socket as a power source. Just pop the adaptor in and away you go.

As we've said, this isn't an audiophile device, but the sound quality is good and it's extremely easy to use. Next issue, we'll round up the best of the rival transmitters for you in our Group Test and let you know how they all compare. James Ellerbeck

Acer P660

tech.co.uk staff — 1203065786

There are three members of the Acer p600 series that the company calls professional navigation devices. The p610 is the basic model at £180, the p630 costs £200 and adds European maps and Bluetooth, while this p660 is at the top of the tree and includes TMC (Traffic Message Channel) and comes at a street price of £239 (inc. VAT).

The receiver unit is very slim and svelte, but that impression is lost by the time you've attached the hefty windscreen mount, plugged in the power cord and connected the TMC aerial, which you are supposed to attach with two tiny suckers and route around the perimeter of the windscreen. It looks a complete mess and to cap it all, the TMC performance was less than ideal.

The receiver has a big, bright and vibrant screen with substantial virtual buttons that are fairly easy to operate with a fingertip, although you also get a stylus in the package.

In some respects, the p660 reminds us of a PDA rather than a dedicated GPS unit, as it took a relatively long time to lock on to the GPS satellites. After that, the screen displayed seven satellites with individual signal meters, with glimpses of three more satellites, like some sort of graphic equaliser.

The other annoyance was that you have to toggle the virtual keyboard between letters and numbers when you want to enter a postcode. Selecting a destination and navigating with the map was fine; however, the POI (Points Of Interest) feature was awful.

To select an airport or garage for example, you have to scroll down a list. After that you can narrow the field by selecting a likely candidate from a list. However, the information given is limited to a phone number, so if you want to find a restaurant in a strange town, you'll find you're on your own.

For all its faults, we still found it a handy device to use.

Musical Fidelity A1008

tech.co.uk staff — 1180652400

By name and styling, Musical Fidelity sets out its plans for the A1008 integrated amplifier. Its name harks back to the classic A1000 amplifier of the early 1990s, so you know it's going to sound enticing. Its looks are almost identical to the mighty and current kW 550 amp, so you know it's powerful.

There's more to this amplifier than meets the eye on casual inspection. The A1008 is a large, two-box integrated amplifier design. That's not an oxymoron - the amplifier has a separate power supply, but the signal handling and gain stages are all in the one big box.

Alongside the normal line-level inputs, it sports not only a MM/MC switchable phono stage (now rare in new amps) but comes with a built-in 24-bit/192kHz Delta-Sigma DAC, not too dissimilar to the company's own X-DACv8.

This even includes a USB socket, allowing the computer to join forces with the hi-fi electronics without compromising the sound through a PC sound card. With an increasing number of computers being used as music servers, this is becoming an important aspect of hi-fi replay and Musical Fidelity has anticipated the increasing demand.

One of Musical Fidelity's mainstays in the catalogue has been the X-10D in all its guises. It's a tube buffer stage featuring ECC88 double triode valves, which effectively irons out any inconsistencies between the output of the source component and input of the amplifier - some source components deliver a high output impedance, which is precisely not what most amplifiers want at their input stages.

By buffering that input impedance and delivering a more amp-chummy lower output impedance, all's well. The X-10D proved extremely popular... and that circuit is in the A1008, nestling snugly at the input stage of the preamp section.

The rest of the amplifier is pure solid-state meat. The power amp stage comprises two monoblocks in the same case, capable of delivering 250 watts into eight ohms and a healthy 400 watts into four, running in Class AB.

This is essentially a scaled-down version of the kW 550 design, to such a close degree that Musical Fidelity claims that - if using loudspeakers of 89dB sensitivity or higher - the two products are indistinguishable from one another.

The bigger, more expensive kW 550 will have the edge when played through less efficient speakers because of its greater headroom. That's it.

If a two-box, one-box amp is not oxymoronic, how about this... the A1008 is an integrated amp that's almost totally separated. Musical Fidelity separates out the preamp, left and right channels almost totally.

Each one has its own separate power supply and is even fed from a different tap from the external PSU box. That means where most companies might be content with one hawser to tie the amp to its juice box, Musical Fidelity uses a trio of the things: two meaty Speakon-connected cables for the left and right power amps and a slightly smaller XLR-type connector for the preamp and DAC feed.

Ignore the last one at your peril: the amplifier will protect itself and your speakers, but it's not a good idea.

Because of the sort of power on offer here, you'd be wise to hook everything up and double check before powering up the device. A quarter of a kilowatt is like a slumbering amplifier beast; waking it up by making a source scream down the speaker wires isn't good for drive units (but is still better than overdriving an underpowered amplifier into speaker-killing clipping day in, day out).

Operationally, the A1008 is a 'fit and forget' device... but it's a big fit and forget device: the main box is larger than most standard hi-fi tables.

Fortunately, it will sit on the top shelf of every regular stand. It runs mildly warm in use (power consumption maxes out at 700 watts, and runs 120 watts in idle/standby mode) but nothing like the Class A devices of old - the small, sweet sounding 25-watt A1 had a ribbed top-plate that could just about double up as a griddle.

Build quality is good, although not without its quibbles. In particular, the motorised central volume control did get raspy through the speakers as it moved through the higher regions of its travel. In fairness, this was hardly audible at volume levels that would make a whisper seem like a jet engine at full throttle, but volume pots tend to get more noisy, not less, with age.

The oft-used cliche of 'the mail'd fist in the velvet glove' takes on new meaning here. Musical Fidelity has managed to combine the grunt of a 250-watt beast with the gentle sweetness of a sensitive, 25-watt, Class A flower. The result is musical mastery.

There's an enormous temptation to get things totally wrong and hook this amp up to some inefficient, concrete-coned loudspeaker to see how the amp behaves - this is, at best, of academic interest for a reviewer, useless in reality.

Instead, go for an efficient loudspeaker of 90dB sensitivity and see how the speaker behaves with 250 watts gripping it by the cones. Now that's an interesting exercise.

Couple this amp to such speakers and you get near-infinite headroom and dynamic range, together with a curious smoothing out of some idiosyncrasies in the speaker itself. No, the A1008 is not capable of transforming the worst speakers into the best, but it does give a loudspeaker the chance of showing what it can do under 'ideal' conditions.

Naturally, the amplifier goes loud - loud enough to leave some speakers a smoking ruin. But that's missing the point. It doesn't go 'loud', it goes 'right' - you tend to use the A1008's volume control to adjust the level to get the correct volume for any given piece of music, not just to wick the sound up and down in some arbitrary fashion.

Once again, this comes down to near infinite headroom and dynamics. Freed from having to place limits on the volume ceiling, you set the volume level according to the scale of the piece of music, not the point where the amp or speaker starts to get out of control.

You don't cut back because the flutes distort, because the flutes aren't likely to distort. You don't hold off because the bass guitar gets out of control for the same reason.

This doesn't mean the amplifier is without a sound. Far from it. It sounds controlled, detailed and yet sort of chocolatey-rich. But these are the sort of attributes that do not make themselves directly apparent.

The amp doesn't shout its features at you, you just realise that you are listening further into the mix and you can understand an awful lot of what's going on in the inner structure of the music. The midband is particularly fine: sounds project into the room beautifully and the nature of those sounds is extraordinarily easy to listen to.

The words 'listener' and 'fatigue' simply do not exist side by side with this amp. No audiophile minute-long chunks of sound, here - you get the full cut, the whole symphony not just the key movement, and still come back hungry for more.

This just scratches the surface. There's still the DAC and the phono stage to work through. In fact, these sound remarkably similar, in all the right ways.

Both deliver a similar performance to the line stages - rich, detailed (but not hyper-detailed and etched sounding), effortless. Of the two, the DAC is arguably more important these days, especially with that USB port.

This does wonders for the sound off a PC, raising even a humble stock soundcard to the performance of the best in computer audio. But don't count out the phono stage - it's a noise-free stage, far better than almost all integrated units and more enticing than many lesser aftermarket models. You'll get better stereo separation from the best standalone devices, but as it stands, this is a lot more than a makeweight.

This isn't the only 250-watt (or larger) amp on the market. Some are a lot cheaper, but generally sound cheap, too, with bright and steely tops and flappy, ill-controlled bottoms (now there's an image you might not want to think too hard about).

Some are more expensive, but tend to sound 'impressive' with extended high treble and an open midrange, at the expense of a well-controlled but slow bass. There are a handful of products that improve upon the Musical Fidelity sound.

Comparing the A1008 to the best of breed does pin-point a minor sense of disassociation between the bass and the rest of the frequencies, as if the bottom end is fractionally out of step with the rest of the sound. But this is the only limitation to the sound of the A1008 and, in fairness, it's both very slight and very difficult and expensive to eliminate without sacrificing the rest of the sound in the process.

Perhaps that's the key thing about the A1008. It does so much for the sound across the board, it's hard to think of anything that can do better without costing a lot more. That makes it a tough act to follow.

Mio Digiwalker H610

tech.co.uk staff — 1159372071

Not all PMP devices put entertainment first, as the DigiWalker H610 is first and foremost a pocket-sized satellite navigation system that claims to offer a generous serving of digital entertainment on the side. We thought we'd see how it performs when it's not keeping you on the straight and narrow.

The first problem you'll face when using the H610 as a PMP is actually getting the content on to it. You can't simply hook it up to your laptop using USB and drag and drop the files across in Windows Explorer, but instead need to use the bundled Mio Transfer software. In fairness, a lot of players use this approach and while the Mio software is straightforward, with a clean interface, we found it incredibly slow to use.

You'll also need to convert videos to the necessary MP4 format, which requires yet another piece of software and, yes, takes more time, particularly if the file you're converting is large.

Once you've done all this, you can access videos by tapping the MioPlayer icon on the touchscreen and then selecting your desired file from the list with another tap. You can then flip the file into full-screen landscape to view it, but don't expect a cinematic experience - the screen is too small to make widescreen stuff look decent. The single speaker is tinny and shrill - we'd recommend plugging in a decent pair of headphones.

Storage is limited, as you only get 2GB of Flash memory, although this can be expanded with an SD card - you can now pick up a 1GB card for as little as £10 (inc. VAT) from most supermarkets.

When it comes to its core skills, the H610 is actually a very accomplished sat-nav unit, with maps of Western Europe and Mio's nifty mapping software crammed into a neat pocket-sized unit with a 4.5-hour battery life. But when it comes to multimedia matters, well, it really loses its way.