Every year at Christmas the ever-indulgent wife and I get one 'house' gift - some extravagance we might not get elsewise.

Usually it's something I'm after but this past Christmas she really wanted a nice new HDTV. That, of course, led to other things. I got her a nice HD-DVD player (still good even with Sony buying out the format wars because it makes our regular DVDs look so much better). Then she decided that I wanted a PS/3 (which by mere happenstance is the cheapest, nicest way to play Blu-Ray DVDs).

For Valentine's Day she decided I (once again) wanted a Home Theater system - she'd been seeing the ads for the Bose 3.2.1. We checked it out and it did qualify under our Valentine's rules (it has someething red on the box). The 3.2.1 only gives you simulated surround sound - no rear speakers - but it's really good simulated surround. The system is also a DVD / CD player and includes an AM/FM tuner. Turned out there's a somewhat more expensive version that has the Bose equivalent of an MP3 player. We got that one. She grumped about the extra cost for about 3 days.

When the Bose folks do something, they tend to do it very well. That's why their systems are good value for the money (downside being you have to get a lot of value). Their 'uMusic' system stores (on the 3.2.1 GSX) 200 hours of music. You can only feed in 10 CDs / session and then it needs about 6 hours powered down to digest them. They're stored at full CD quality and it analyzes 30 some factors about each track. You can playback tracks or albums and you can, of course, make playlists.

But here's the real fun, and the payoff for this absurdly long comment:

The uMusic system has 9 'Presets' where it learns what you like. It starts off with a randomly selected track from everything you've loaded. You either let it play, skip to the next track, give it a '-' rating or give it a '+' rating. Letting a track play does nothing for the settings. Skipping a track gives it a small downgrade (we'll say a -1). Giving it a '-' rating downgrades it more than just skipping (call it -5) and skips to the next track. Hitting '+' we'll say gives it a +5. What it's doing is rating all of those factors it worked out. In surprisingly short time it 'knows' what kind of music you like and starts digging compatible tracks out of your collection. There are some other buttons as well - you can have it play the whole CD the track is from and there's an 'Encore' button where it will play all the tracks that it thinks are like the one you were just listening to.

We have three presets defined right now - one for each of us and one for the two of us. Our individual ones are already pretty well tuned and distinctivly different. We don't have all our CDs loaded - some are the sort of thing you wouldn't load, like audio books and such. Some we just didn't have room for - we've got 13.2 hours of space left in that 200 (although there are at least an hour or two of tracks that appear on multiple CDs I can cull down). Still, that's over 2,700 tracks.

It's ever so much better than the radio! Her preset sounds like a very good radio station, mine is... somewhat more eclectic seguing from Blue Man Group to ZZ Top to Pink Floyd to Peter Gabriel to...

It'd be a long drive for you but there's a Bose store way down at the South end of KC. If you're ever down there have them give you the home theater demo and check out the systems.

So, Steve - how much are you making from *this* commercial you inserted here in the comments?

BWA-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Not a thing - just sharing the pain. ;)

I mean, why should I be the only sucker?

Tom Skerritt's voice is getting on your nerves? Oh no! It's a sign of the apocalypse! He is, in my mind, one of the sexiest men ever and his voice is yummy. Sam Elliott's, too.

Excuse. I'm having a hot flash. I'll be back.

The first time or two I heard the commercials, it was fine, but these damn things are played endlessly here in the KC area!