Hasta La Gadget!

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The back story of every gear nut starts with an “Aha!” moment. That epic instant where a simple device provides an astounding effect or fixes a previously daunting problem. From that moment on, the gear nut will chase the dragon of that intoxicating feeling, buying up gadget after gadget.

Musicians are some of the most privileged gear hounds because their equipment ostensibly serves a higher purpose. But sooner or later they mask their addiction with increasingly flimsy rationalizations. This gadget gallery is dedicated to them, with eight “Aha!” devices to covet. Enjoy!

Be sure to let us know what your favorite “Aha!” device is in the comments section.

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Z.Vex Nano Head guitar amplifier

Purported to be the world’s smallest production tube amplifier, this half-watt wonder of engineering is made by boutique effects-pedal builders Z.Vex Amps. If you’re looking for the tone of a cranked Marshall stack, but fears of being evicted from your pad have you playing unplugged or suffering from horrible tone, this little bad boy might just be the answer. Plug your ax in and get huge sound at bedroom volumes. The likes of Billy Gibbons, Angus Young and Tracii Guns are plugging in, so maybe you should to. List price: $500.

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It looks like a Taser, but the most shocking thing about the Zoom H4 is its versatility. Two built-in microphones in an X/Y pattern deliver high-quality stereo recordings, while two combo XLR/quarter-inch inputs let you plug in your favorite mikes or electric instruments. The extremely portable mobile recorder stores 24-bit/96-kHz digital audio files (or MP3s at bit rates up to 320 kbps) on a Secure Digital card.

The triple-duty Zoom H4 also works as a four-track recorder or a USB audio interface for recording directly to your computer. List price: $500.

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Getting sweet bass tone doesn’t have to be a backbreaking endeavor, as proved by the new LowDown combos from Line 6. Weighing in at just 48 pounds, the 150-watt LD150 packs five tweakable models based on classic amps (Eden Traveler, Ampeg B-15 flip top, Marshall Super Bass and Ampeg SVT, with and without distorted SansAmp PSA-1).

The versatile amp gets even freakier with five built-in effects (compressor, bass synth, envelope filter, octaver and chorus) that will have you boomin’ like Bootsy. Perfect for practice and low-volume gigs, the LD150’s tilt-back design means those custom tones will make it to your ears, rather than firing into the backs of your knees. Onboard tuner, clean XLR out and a jack for adding a snazzy Line 6 foot controller complete the package. List price: $570.

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Get a lick stuck in your head late at night. The wife is trying to watch television. You want to play a little guitar on a road trip. Plug your Gretsch into the AmPlug, throw on a pair of headphones and away you jam to Vox-like tones. You can even plug your MP3 player in and play along with your favorite tunes. Comes in five flavors: Metal, Bass, AC30, Classic Rock or Lead. List price: $40.

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This strange and wonderful contraption from Japanese artist Toshio Iwai combines a digital sampler and sequencer with an animated LED light show. Not only do the lights look cool and act as a performance element, they also give you visual feedback as you use it to manipulate sounds.

At its simplest level each row represents a voice and each column represents a note in a sequence, and the Tenori-On plays any marked note as it plays from left to right at an adjustable tempo. All you have to do is press the LED switch of the note you want it to play, and it will loop around, playing the note at each pass. Add more notes and blocks and your own samples beyond the 256 preset voices and you can get lost in this machine for days. List price: $1,000.

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How many times have you had a great idea for a song while out walking around or traveling away from your computer? You can always leave it on a voicemail or get a voice recorder, but what if you want to keep building on the idea?

FourTrack makes sure you always have the recording tools you need. This app turns your iPhone into a four-track recorder, allowing you to write, edit and mix rough ideas anywhere you take your phone. The app also makes transferring and importing what you’ve recorded onto your home recording setup a breeze. It may not have all the bells and whistles you’re used to in a desktop program like Pro Tools, but the function and portability it provides are well worth the modest $10 price tag.

Check out Wired.com’s full FourTrack review here.

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This Nintendo DS software puts a full-fledged KORG synthesizer and sequencer in the palm of your hand. There’s even a built-in drum machine that uses sounds made from the synthesizer simulator.

With a mind-boggling amount of tone controls — delay, chorus and flange effects — and the ability to connect 4 DS’s wirelessly to execute huge musical orchestrations, this is a must-have for sonic geeks of all levels. List price: $40.

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In some circles, Ableton’s Live software is as well-known as Pro Tools, but for many musicians it’s an untapped treasure trove of goodness. The software can fill many roles, but it’s essentially a sequencer for audio loops and samples.

If you’ve been to a show where the musicians are playing some of their music from their MacBook, chances are good this is the program they’re using. Performers like Live for its simplicity, speed and customizability. As a performer, you can set up the pattern or sequence of different instruments and samples to play along to and also modify different sounds in real time. A growing number of home-studio musicians prefer its interface and options over Pro Tools or Logic.

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Just hours after announcing plans to sell a high-end Mac clone, niche electronics reseller EFIX USA changed course in order to avoid a nasty legal confrontation with Apple.

"We certainly don’t want to get into a legal battle that’s over a couple thousand dollars," an EFIX USA spokesman said. "Potentially Apple could have a legal issue there. They may not have a legal issue, but with all the money they have they might try to make one."

Despite the sudden turnabout, it’s getting harder and harder for Apple
to guard the most precious jewel at the core of its success: The Mac
operating system.

Apple
forbids Mac OS X from running on anything but a Mac. But in the past
year, an army of Mac cloners has emerged, their rise facilitated in large part by Apple’s 2006 decision to switch to Intel chips. The most prominent example is
Florida-based Psystar, a startup selling Mac clones, which has been in
legal battle with Apple since July. Shortly following Psystar’s lead
were companies with similar offerings: OpenTech, OpeniMac and Art
Studios Entertainment Media.

Friday morning, AppleInsider reported that EFIX USA was going to start selling custom-made PCs with
a Mac-OS-loaded USB dongle included inside. But in a phone interview with
Wired.com, EFIX USA said it was going to cancel this deal, in fear that
Apple would construe this offer — a computer shipped with a Mac OS X
booter — as a Mac clone.

HR&O attorney Eric Overholt said
the dongle will likely face legality issues with Apple. He explained
Apple could potentially allege piracy and copyright infringement in
violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, because the
Taiwanese company is essentially copying the Mac BIOS and putting it in
a chip (the dongle).

"My thought is that this company will
face the same type of lawsuit and claims that Psystar is facing," said
Eric Overholt, an attorney with HR&O. "This dongle tricks
the clone into thinking that the clone is actually a Mac. There will
also most likely be claims against [the company] for ‘reverse
engineering’ the Mac BIOS in order to create their ‘dongle.’"

Art
Studios Entertainment Media’s dongle shows how the definition of a "Mac
clone" has become blurry. And that gives away just how easy it’s become
for manufacturers to steal Apple’s operating system — and market it in
different ways in order to dodge legal bullets.

"I would say that one of
the things that’s happening to Apple is that it’s less able to keep
secrets than it used to be because it has broader supply chain and
broader distribution," said Roger Kay, an Endpoint Technologies analyst.

Apple
wasn’t always opposed to Mac clones. For a brief period in the 1990s —
when Steve Jobs was still exiled from Apple — Apple CEO Michael
Spindler licensed the Mac operating system to several manufacturers: Power Computing, Motorola, Umax, APS, Radius and DayStar. When Jobs retook the helm in
1997, one of the first items on his agenda was to destroy the clone
program and eliminate these cheaper alternatives to Apple’s goods.

But in 2006, Apple opened itself up to attack again
(knowingly or not) when it ditched its own Power PC processors in favor
of Intel’s more power-efficient CPUs. Because Apple then had to code OS X to run on Intel processors, it opened a door for
hackers: They could modify the operating system code to run on any Intel-powered, non-Mac machine.

The Intel switch gave birth to an underground community of hackers dubbed OSX86, who anonymously contribute
to a wiki that details the techniques required to get the Mac OS to work on other
Intel machines. The OSX86 community is what made Psystar and all the aforementioned
companies possible, and it’s also what enables people to install Mac OS X on a netbook, a popular hack.

"People were talking about Apple coming out with a laptop under $800 for the first time, and someone already made one and it’s a
[hacked] netbook," said Brad Linder, blogger of Liliputing.   

Although running OS X on a non-Apple machine may violate Apple’s
software license agreements and copyrights, and may be a violation of
the DMCA, the new crop of clone makers have plenty of tricky moves to
evade legal trouble.

One of the trickiest moves comes from Art Studios Entertainment Media. The company isn’t
selling a Mac clone, per se. It’s manufacturing a USB dongle
that lets PCs boot up any operating system, including OS X. Conveniently enough, Art Studios Entertainment Media calls the product EFI-X, and is selling the product through EFIX USA, the reseller that no longer wants to be known as a maker of Mac clones. The Taiwanese company is urging EFIX USA to avoid marketing the dongle’s primary feature as booting computers
off OS X — even though that’s what most customers likely want it for.

Confused yet? EFIX USA says it is too.

"We get somewhat mixed signals on what [Art Studios Entertainment Media] would really like
to accomplish," an EFIX USA spokesman said. "They produce the device and want to sell it, but
somehow they don’t want it to come out that the primary function of the
device is that it allows people to run OS X on generic Intel hardware."

Another company with a
creative plan to put out a Mac clone was OpenTech. The Florida-based
company launched in July, promising to sell computers together with a
how-to kit on installing the operating system of your choice, including
Apple’s. A spokesman for OpenTech made bold statements,
saying, "Our legal team has come to the conclusion that we wouldn’t be
violating any copyright laws or any other laws." But just a month
later, OpenTech shut down its operation and put it up for sale. 

Apple continues to battle Psystar, a Florida-based company that started selling PCs hacked to run OS X
in April. Apple in mid-July filed a lawsuit alleging copyright,
trademark and shrink-wrap license infringement. And much to Apple’s
surprise, Psystar’s legal team is fighting back, leading the
corporation to believe the small company may be receiving help from other parties — perhaps another competing corporation.   

Since
the Mac clone market is young, it’s difficult to tell how much these clone makers and netbook hackers are actually cutting into Apple’s sales. Given the difficulty of getting the hacks to work, or even of getting a clone maker on the phone, total sales of Mac clones are probably miniscule. And it’s unlikely we’ll see Mac clones break
into the mainstream any time soon, given Apple’s ruthless legal team.

Even so, Apple’s clone problem is unlikely to go away in the near future. As long as OS X runs on Intel hardware, and as long as the developers behind OSX86 continue their work, it will be difficult for Apple to stop cloning altogether.

See Also:

• Apple Cries Corporate Conspiracy Behind Psystar
• Psystar: Blu-Ray Hackintosh for Sale; MacBook Clones on the Way …
• Apple Finally Sues Mac Copycat Psystar
• Psystar Tags Back Apple With Antitrust Suit
• Apple Demands That Psystar Recalls All Hackintoshes
• Psystar Offers Cloned OS X Servers
• One-month-old Mac Cloner Open Tech up for Sale
• Open Tech Launches Mac Clones
• Open Tech: Apple Can’t Stop Us From Making Mac Clones
• Attorney: Open Tech Mac Cloner Subject to Legal Troubles
• Another Mac Clone To Come

Photo: How-to-Wiki/Wired.com

The room-size Model C speaker system should satisfy music nuts, creating spatial sound so pure it’s intergalactic. Steinway engineers design open boxes that capture the resonance of live music and pinpoint each instrument in the concert hall. Moneybags, this sound system’s for you.