Gadgetory

I'm David Carr Noy executive editor cnet.com and I'm here at a townhouse in Greenwich Village where bose is demonstrating its new sound touch system this is a Wi-Fi based multi-room audio system and it has introduced three new speakers the sound touch 30 which is the largest system is designed for bigger rooms that's $700 and there's the sound touch 20 which is a little bit smaller speaker that retails for $400 and then there's an even smaller portable unit the sound touch portable which is also foreign dollars and that is designed to be taken from room to room you can unplug it and it does have a rechargeable battery inside it the key to the system is that bose has tried to make it ultra simple thus the sound touch name there are six buttons on top of these units they correspond to six presets in the app so you can set any radio station or Pandora it will launch with Pandora and in future software upgrades they'll add additional services next year you can also obviously stream your music library from your computer and map one of those presets to your music library all the speakers are designed to work with the apps and you can add various rooms by adding various speakers they're also airplay compatible so if you want to go straight to one of the speakers using airplay from your smart your iOS device you could also do that the units also come with a IR remote with those same corresponding six buttons so if you don't want to use the app you can use that little remote additionally Bose is going to be selling a special sound touch controller it's a little bit fancier remote that is also designed with to work with all the systems so look for more Bose soundTouch products later this year and next year a couple other things worth mentioning on the two non portable speakers there is an Ethernet connection so you can use these as a wired speaker and add them to your network there's also an auxilary input so you can play other audio sources through the speaker without going wireless in terms of streaming from room to room you can stream to one single speaker and have a play in just in that room or you can combine various rooms and join them up and have the music play everywhere throughout your home the Bose soundTouch app which is free will be available for iOS Android and both Mac and Windows PCs so all in all an interesting move by Bose until now Sonos has really own this multi-room audio in the consumer space but with Bose going into it obviously it's going to put a lot of marketing dollars behind this so I'd say sonís will have its first big competitor here and we'll look forward to testing these products further I'm David karna and that's the new Bose soundTouch multi-room audio system