FEATURE
My Book Live. It can be used as a stylish, supremely simple NAS for virtually any computer used today, effortlessly and wirelessly sharing files between any Mac and PC and automatically backing up files. But its main focus is on providing a 'personal cloud'.
WD has a persuasive argument: 'A personal cloud is your content secure at home and under your control. Unlike public clouds, a personal cloud allows you to keep all your content in one safe place on your home network. Share files, stream media, and access your content anywhere. No monthly fees. No mysterious location of your data. Keep your media and files safe at home and always with you.'
Well, it's here. Blue Aura's V30 Blackline is a stylish retro hybrid tube amplifier with diminuitive matching speakers sleekly covered in black faux-leather. You can't buy anything as pleasant sounding for your Mac, iPad or iPod (or any other device) for anything near the price: $549. You can't buy anything better looking either. Inputs are USB, line out, or the traditional 'aux': anything you could possibly want to plug in. Compare the V30 to any system you've previously used on your computer and you'll find yourself uttering the well-worn adjectives people always seem to use to describe tube sound: warmth, air, movement, depth, feeling, soul.
Blue Aura's V30 is not high end audio. That still costs in the tens of thousands. It's something quite different — a new category. It uses tubes to humanize digital sound at an affordable price. It's warm, vivid home sound at reasonable cost. It's the most pleasant audio you can get for under a thousand dollars. And that's exactly what all music lovers have needed for more than two decades. Now we have it.
There's one more thing: High-end audio equipment is always large. It therefore poses insoluble problems in interior design and is a known cause of spousal breakdown. For Blue Aura, visual design is as important as audio design. The V30 is small, and can be used as a potential knockout featire in nearly any interior. Considered purely as unique retro kit, it's unbeatable.
Summary
The MacBook Retina is trying to bring some huge new technology to the table and as a result is exposing fault lines in today's OS, web, and app technologies. It's almost perfect today and will be perfectly perfect a few months from now. The Blue Aura v30 is trying to bring old but great technology to the table by modernizing it so it can interface with today's devices. It works flawlessly today: plug it in, and you don't have to think about it anymore. You just enjoy it. Though they come from opposite ends of the historical and conceptual spectrums, both are fascinating and fabulous products we feel privileged to award this summer.
And one more thing ... Western Digital MyBook Live
Western Digital's MyBook World series of NAS drives attracted an enormous following. Its successor is called the
However, while we agree that privacy is a good thing, we also think you need off-site storage! We like a lot of things about the My Book Live. For one thing, it's noticeably faster than its predecessor. It can approach saturation of Gigabit bandwidth, and that's fast. We very much like that the model we tested, the My Book Live Duo, can be used for up to 6TB of storage with RAID 0 or, as we prefer, for complete safety, 3TB of storage with RAID 1. What we like most is the device's ease of use. There's nothing to get in the way, it just does its job, protecting your data. Best for last: There are no fans. This is one of the quietest external hard drives ever built.
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