High-end Jukeboxes for the Home

I don't go out much anymore, but occasionally I hit a local bar with a jukebox. Last week I went out and found myself at a nearby joint with a state-of-the-art jukebox. Wow. It's as if I had been under a rock for the past two or three years. This broadband-connected wonder had cool features, such as prioritizing your songs for more money and the ability to download any song you might want, even if it isn't in the chock-full-of-music menu (all animated on screen, of course).

So I was totally over the moon when I saw a couple of new jukebox-like devices at CES earlier this month from Rock-Ola.  (The company has been making jukeboxes since 1935, when it was founded by David C. Rockola, who some say eventually helped inspire the term "rock and roll.")

Of the two new units, the Nostalgic Music Center is the showpiece. It has a built-in 160 GB hard drive that can digitize and store 2,800-plus CDs, which can then be accessed via a user-friendly touchscreen menu that lets you drag and drop songs into a playlist—really nifty for on-the-fly playlist creation at parties. It was a loud hall where I checked out the thing, so I wasn't able to get a decent listen for sound quality, but it's got 360 watts, a built-in amplifier and five speakers, along with external audio outputs for extra speakers. Only thing it doesn't do, at the moment, is download tunes from, say, an online music store, much less support DRM, but Rock-Ola says it might expand its downloadable music options in the future. Right now, the broadband connection is used solely to get album art and other CD information.

The other new unit is the iPod Series jukebox, a home version of the CD Bubbler you may have seen out and about at bars or diners. It comes with an iPod dock, which means the old-school CD-based jukebox is also a really big iPod speaker system with a CD changer that you can control using a remote control.

Who's ready to stick one of these in the rec room?