Anyone who's had much exposure to Bose's bulky QuietComfort 2s or smaller QuietComfort 3s knows the story: they cancel noise pretty well, and they sound pretty good, though in the last few years—QuietComforts have been around in their current incarnations for a surprisingly long time—other companies have stepped in with products that do pretty much the same thing, cheaper. So! Bose has two options: Go low, or, you know, improve the product. With the QuietComfort 15, which will replace the old old old QC2 starting tomorrow, they've gone with the latter.

From a design standpoint, this is a very familiar product—it's hard to find any external hardware changes aside from a new LED indicator and a slightly changed curvature on the headband. Likewise on the sound, which is perfectly adequate, but won't blow audiophiles away.

The noise canceling, on the other hand, is a different story: it strips out low frequencies way, way better than the QC2 or QC3, to the point that typical airline noise (simulated in my test, but definitely loud) becomes almost imperceptible. Wearing these things sounds almost like wearing two of the old models, stacked, if that makes any sense. Pending fuller tests, I'd say it feels like this is a healthy upgrade for the QuietComfort's target customers: guys in suits with belt-strapped iPod Classics, and airlines.

That said, they're still fairly bulbous, and probably deserved a redesign, since this shell's been around for nearly a decade. That, and the price: The QuietComfort 15 is going to inherit the $300 pricepoint, and since its improvements are fairly subtle, it'll be hard not to feel a little ripped-off at the register. [Bose]

Tony Bongiovi, producer of lots of great rock albums and founder of the legendary Power Station recording studio here in NYC and second cousin to Jon Bon helped iHome develop said processing profile, called DPS. Basically, it's like the "loudness" switch on your dad's stereo—it boosts high- and low-end frequency, but the claim to newness here is that the software actively evaluates the frequency profile of whatever MP3s you feed into it and provides boost where it's needed. Dubious? Maybe. And does it sound more amazing than any iPod dock ever? Of course not.

I heard it next to some Yamaha NS-10 studio monitors (playing 160kbps Apple Store MP3s) and yeah, the monitors sounded better. Of course. But the iHome doesn't sound bad.

Keep in mind you can get a great (and probably superior, soundwise) 2.1 setup for half the cost of the $300 iP1, but if you need an actual dock input, love the speakers-through-lucite look and have $300 to burn, sure, why not.

Called iTunes Plus, it's available now, and all it asks is an extra 30 cents per song ($1.29 for each instead of $.99 for iTunes songs). Is there a big difference in sound quality between those 128kbps iTunes files and these 256kbps iTunes Plus songs? Let's dig into iTunes Plus, grab a few files and compare them to the old-style locked-up tunes.

To access the iTunes Plus songs, a limited selection with only EMI artists thus far, first you must upgrade your iTiunes software to version 7.2.0.34. Then, you simply tell iTunes you'd like for it to offer you iTunes Plus songs whenever they're available.

Then it offers (for thirty cents each) to convert any 128kbps tunes you already have into iTunes Plus files, if they are available that way. This was easier said than done. Our collection here only had five songs that qualified. We're still not sure why, but we got an error message on four of the five songs. Could it be that we had already stripped the DRM from those songs? Could be, could be.

We downloaded two more iTunes songs to see what would happen, and the same thing occurred. Errors (see graphic below). Throughout the day, we experienced numerous timeouts with the new iTunes Plus store, a situation we're thinking (hoping) is because of the intense interest in unchaining libraries of music held captive for the past few years. By the way, don't get too eager to spread those songs around, because there's still user info embedded in each "DRM free" file you download.

Moving beyond those little hitches, after lots of attempts we found a few songs we wanted to download in the iTunes Plus section, snagged those and then painstakingly changed our preferences to download the 128kbps versions of those same songs for comparison. Among a few others, we listened to Cold Play, and some complicated Salsa by Juan Luis Guerra to compare the quality of one compression rate to the other.

Comparing these two bitrates was tough, even when using a pair of state-of-the-art Ultrasone headphones. In our decidedly unscientific comparison, we listened to all the tunes at both bitrates in A/B comparisons with those phones, with iPod stock earbuds, on our kick-ass car stereo, and on our reference Dolby 5.1 home theater system.

The difference between the two types was subtle. Listening to a variety of songs, each encoded in 128kbps and then 256kbps, showed very little difference between the two, if any. Frankly, neither sounded as good as it could have to these trained musician's ears, but to discern the difference would take a professionally-trained audiophile's ears and perhaps a permanently-embedded oscilloscope in the brain.

Anyone who swears he or she can tell the difference, I would say have someone give you a double blind test and see if you can correctly guess more than 50% of the examples. Sure, you'll be able to spot a 64kbps file, but comparing 128 to 256 is more challenging. Good luck, golden ears. Even if you can tell the slight difference, it's not a big enough diff to start celebrating anything. Suffice to say that both sounded good enough to enjoy the music, if that's what you're after. For high fidelity, I'd suggest you abandon compression altogether and listen to vinyl. Better yet, go to a live concert.

The real jewel here is the lack of DRM, letting you play your music wherever you want. Hallelujah! Play them on a PSP, or on any music player that can handle AAC-encoded files. Play them here or there, play them anywhere. You can even abandon iTunes altogether if you want, well, with those limited songs that are available thus far, that is. The point is, for an extra $.30, you now own the rights to listen to your music wherever you want. And that is a joy that we should have had all along. Let's hope this is just the beginning. – Charlie White