Russound's iBridge Bay lets you use the company’s UNO touchscreens and keypads, located in any room of the house, to retrieve iTunes media stored on a Mac computer. Although it was designed with the Mac mini in mind, the iBridge Bay (shown here below a Mac mini) will work with most recent Apple computers.

What has Russound recently introduced that you feel points toward the near future?
The best example is our entry into the Media Center category, the Smart Media Console (SMC). Typical for Russound, it's a home entertainment product first and foremost, with features and overall usability that let the user know that it was designed by an A/V company, not a PC manufacturer.

The iBridge Dock is one of the more interesting introductions. Just about everybody has a product that lets users add an iPod to a home theater system. But here again we set out to create something that is typically Russound. Instead of just passing audio from the player to another room, iBridge Dock offers complete metadata and iPod-like controls when used with our RNET system.

Our follow-up, the iBridge Bay, offers similar functionality for people with iTunes collections stored on Macs. With iTunes and iPod becoming many peoples' primary vehicles for audio and video access, we think it's essential to elevate the experience from something PC-centric to true whole-house entertainment. Giving people greater access to entertainment throughout the house is what we do best.

There seems to be some movement away from proprietary control systems towards more open-standard, PC-based installations. How do you see Russound responding to this trend?
Our position is simple: We love open-platform systems because they free us up to focus on the areas that offer the most value to our customers without having to worry about compatibility. Russound is all about making media more accessible, not less.

When we started out, we built our business on developing a few simple sources of music more accessible to or readily controlled by the audio enthusiast. The menu was pretty basic, usually consisting of a tuner, turntable, tape decks, and maybe some kind of digital signal processing. As far as management issues are concerned, it was as straightforward as you could want. Now people are faced with a slew of media choices that's growing all the time. This makes our mission of simplifying access more complicated, especially when proprietary platforms don't get along. And as much of a challenge as it is for us, it can be paralyzing for an installer whose goal is to satisfy a client without having to waste time and resources contending with technical problems.

So, naturally, we welcome the opportunity to move away from proprietary platforms and focus on the areas in which we excel — primarily, making media easily accessible and manageable by introducing products that enhance our customers' enjoyment rather than detract from it.

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