HDMI Switching ''HDMI Switching'' is one of those terms that sounds terribly complicated and technical, but turn out to be relatively simple and straight forward. In a nutshell, a receiver with HDMI switching can select a single signal from any of the HDMI inputs going into it to send through its HDMI output. Need a little more detail? ...

The Crutchfield Staff Review blog is all about having our employees share their real-world experiences with the items we sell, so customers can make informed decisions. But your experience with the gear is valuable, too. Posting a product review at Crutchfield.com can help others find out important information about products. And — admit it — ...

I like radio. A lot. But over the years I've increasingly disliked the limited choices available on the AM/FM dial here in rural Virginia. So I was extremely happy to check out the new Grace Wireless Internet Radio. Crutchfield carries a variety of these wireless PC music players, but the Grace radio really appealed to me. It looks like a regular ...

OK, I admit I’m something of a gadget geek. But when I go on a business trip, there are just some things I gotta have on my journey. Like my laptop, and cell phone, and digital camera, and iPod, and portable speakers. I’ve been in too many hotel rooms where I’ve had to choose between keeping the floor lamp plugged in or using it for my cell ...

This was supposed to be a post from another colleague. She was going to talk about her experiences with a new camera and show off some of the photos she took on vacation. Unfortunately, her computer's hard drive failed. The pictures were lost and, well, she'd just rather not talk about the trip anymore. I understand. I've owned eight different ...

As I listened to my iPod the other day, it occured to me that there was something wrong. The song selection was excellent, of course -- after all, I'd hand-picked every tune loaded into the library -- but there wasn't much excitement. Was I *gasp* getting tired of my iPod? No, the problem was the silence between ...

One of the perks here at Crutchfield is that I sometimes get to play with the gear. I tried out the new Etón FR250 emergency radio recently, and when I did something unusual happened. The FR250's a true emergency radio. It has a hand-cranked dynamo to power it when the electricity goes out, as well as a built-in ...

In my last iTunes Tune-up post I talked about changing the import default to burn CD tracks at a much higher bitrate for better sound quality. Since that time, music I've added has sounded great. But what about all those songs I had already saved at 128kbps before I changed the setting? It wasn't possible to ''upscale'' those older iTunes files. ...

I recently had an opportunity to do some side-by-side comparisons of Shure's line of in-ear earbud headphones. But this post isn't about the headphones -- it's about the importance of sound file quality. We were doing the tests with an MP3 player, and listening to different kinds of music recorded at the standard 128Kbps. The Shure SE110s are ...

In olden times my parents kept the family's holiday music in a separate part of the record cabinet. The LPs came out in November, and went back in early January. We carried on the same tradition with CDs, until I ripped them all into iTunes. But changing the format brought a new problem. With a digitized music library, I can't physically place ...

Jim Richardson recently posted about some of the exciting programming offered on HD2 channels across the country. Most stations simply simulcast their regular signal in both standard AM or FM and the digital HD Radio version. But that digital signal can be subdivided into other channels, and as Jim pointed out, some commercial stations are ...

Even slight redesigns in a product can change the way it works with third-party accessories -- especially the Apple iPod. In the past, changes in the players' dimensions caused some problems. The old 60GB iPod, for example -- when it first came out, it didn't fit into the docking wells of some of the iPod speaker systems available. Manufacturers ...

In my last post I talked about relocating my iTunes library from my PC's hard drive to an external drive. The process worked so well, I decided to do it to my laptop, too. My laptop serves as a portable office, and I have it with me just about all the time. While I usually leave it set up in the same place throughout the workday (unless I'm ...

It didn't take long for the size of my iTunes library to start taking over my computer's hard drive -- especially once I started saving songs at a higher bitrate for better audio quality. Fortunately, it was pretty simple for me to move my cramped collection of tunes out of my PC and into a 250GB external hard drive where it has room to grow. ...

I assembled my iTunes library of 4,000+ tunes from a variety of different sources. As a result, the volume levels varied greatly from track to track, making for a less-than-ideal listening experience. iTunes provided a simple fix that works for most of these problems. Inside the ''Preferences'' menu, under ''Playback,'' there's a Sound ...

Some of the music in my iTunes library isn't clean. No, not like that. I'm using the term in the broadcasting sense. Some of my tracks don't start clean, and others don't stop clean -- there's extra stuff before or after these songs that I don't really want to hear. The problem selections mostly come from live concert recordings, which ...

In an ideal world, each song I add to my iTunes library would have all the appropriate fields filled out the way I wanted them. In reality, my library is now a few years old and many tunes were imported before I even knew I wanted certain information included. Adding that data after the fact can be time-consuming – especially without some way ...

In my opinion, the ''Grouping'' field is one of the most under-used ways to sort music in an iTunes library. The ''Grouping'' field helps me create new and different mixes of songs, by collecting songs from different categories together in a new smart playlist. And that group can be anything I want. Here's how I used ...

OK, I admit it. I'm a classical music fanatic (although not to the exclusion of other kinds of music). In addition to some basic organizing (see my last post), I also modify track information to suit my needs. Here's how: Step 1: Sorting by style period. Sometimes I just want to hear an hour of renaissance music, or an evening of contemporary ...

Because classical music is catalogued in a fundamentally different way than virtually every other kind of music, it can be a real problem finding the classical work I want in iTunes. Think about finding things in a record store (remember those?). Everything's filed by artist, except for classical, which is filed primarily by ...