Harman Kardon speaker system The same performance- driven approach that made the Power Mac G4 Cube possible went into engineering these Apple-designed Harman Kardon speakers.     The speakers are small, so they take up hardly any space. But don’t let their size fool you. These all-digital beauties give you a frequency response from about 80Hz to 20KHz — which, as any audiophile will tell you, is highly unusual for speakers of this size. The digital Tripath amplifier belts out 20-watt sound (ten watts per channel) with a broad dynamic range, so you hear bookshelf — speaker sound.   All you hear is music Unlike PC speakers — which tend to have a high noise floor, so that even when they’re just sitting on your desk they’re still hissing at you — these Harman Kardon speakers are incredibly hushed. That’s because the audio signal is completely digital, from your Power Mac G4 Cube to the amplifier to the Harman Kardon speaker cones. So the pure digital sound quality coming from your CDs, DVDs and the G4 Cube itself is retained along the entire path. And all you hear is music.

Complete with a slot-loading CD-RW drive, Harman Kardon speakers and Apple iTunes software, the Power Mac G4 Cube is perfect for music lovers with burning ambitions.   iTunes turns your Power Mac G4 Cube into a powerful digital jukebox — only one with way more functionality than any jukebox you’ve ever seen. Running iTunes on your G4 Cube, you can convert songs from your music CDs into MP3 format, store your entire digital music library in one place, create personal playlists, and listen to hundreds of radio stations on the Internet. Perhaps best of all, you can create music CDs that you can listen to on your G4 Cube’s superb audio system — or on your car or home stereo system.     Join the MP3 revolution The Power Mac G4 Cube and iTunes let you ride the wave of a revolution that’s transforming the music industry. MP3 (Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Layer 3) is a powerful industry-standard technology for encoding and compressing audio files. MP3 compresses CD-quality audio files to about a tenth of their original size, with very little loss in audible quality. MP3 works by discarding those parts of the signal that have little effect on the sounds we hear. In other words, it gets rid of the digital baggage that music comes with.   Let ’er rip That’s where iTunes comes into play. iTunes lets you create a digital music library by converting (or “ripping”) songs from your CDs into the high-quality MP3 format, so you can listen to them anytime you like — in any order you like. To add songs to your library, simply stick a CD into the G4 Cube’s built-in CD-RW drive, then select the songs you want — and let ’er rip.     iTunes comes with a default compression setting of 160 kilobytes per second (kbs). And these settings are adjustable downward to the point where you can squeeze more songs onto a CD — or upward to the point where they deliver such high fidelity music that for most people it’s impossible to distinguish between the compressed MP3 version and the original CD song track.   Your typical five-minute song takes up about 44 megabytes of space on a compact disc. Compress that song to MP3 format at 160 kbps, and the file size shrinks to about 6 megabytes. In other words, you can store many more songs in your digital music library — and take more songs with you on your MP3 player.   When you’re online The fun really starts when you’re connected to the Internet. Watch what iTunes does as soon as you pop a music CD into your G4 Cube’s CD-RW drive. The moment the CD mounts, iTunes automatically goes to the web to gather — and enter in your digital music library — information about the artist, the album and each track on that album.

The power of USB The digital amplifier used for the G4 Cube speakers is smaller and more efficient than a standard analog amplifier. This allows the speakers to be powered directly from one of the two USB ports on the G4 Cube or an Apple display with ADC, instead of requiring an AC adapter. And since these are external speakers, you can place them where you want, for best effect.   Starting your digital music library Where do you get the songs for your digital music library? You probably own stacks of music CDs. And you’ve probably noticed that a lot of these CDs feature — at best — only one or two songs you really like. Fact is, if you wanted to take your 100 favorite songs with you on your next vacation, you could wind up having to pack almost that many CDs. Now with the Power Mac G4 Cube and iTunes, you get to hear only the songs you want to hear — in the order in which you want to hear them.   Apple recommends CD-R media with a 74-minute capacity for music.

 

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