Sonicblue Unveils Home Digital Music Hub

Consumer electronics company Sonicblue this week unveiled a high-end home-entertainment hub that can store an entire music collection.

At about $1,500, Sonicblue’s Advanced Digital Audio Center is designed to become the centerpiece of a music enthusiast’s wired home.

It features a 40-gigabyte hard drive that can record up to 650 hours of music.

Through the system, available only via Sonicblue’s Web site, music from a CD can be recorded to its hard drive, played back over receivers within the house, downloaded to an MP3 player, or reorganized and burned onto another CD.

Andy Wolfe, chief technical officer of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sonicblue, said the new model binds the company’s audio strategy, which already includes portable digital-music devices such as its Rio line of CD and MP3 players.

“This is a device that takes our individual products and ties them all together into a system,” he said.

“As you start to build a personal collection of digital music, you can share it in your house, take it to your car, take it to the gym with you or burn CDs for an airplane.”

From DVD players to online radio stations, digital entertainment distribution is a area of rapid growth for consumer hardware makers and audio and video content providers, as consumers embrace new technology that allows them to carry personalized music collections and share with others.

Toward that end, the Advanced Digital Music center is equipped with a modem, which will allow it eventually to send and receive music over the Internet. At some point in the future, people will be able to buy and download tunes and then “stream,” or broadcast, them to others.