It might not impact on the overall volume (especially in Europe where health and safety legislation will limit the maximum dB output), but should help the HTC 8X drive larger power hungry audio devices.

FORBES: HTC Announces 'The Signature Windows Phone' 8X Smartphone

The Peerless drive, for instance, which uses big cartridges that hold up to 20 gigabytes of data, might be useful for in-car digital audio players or as a removable drive for storing video in a TiVo -like TV set-top box.

FORBES: Magazine Article

SmartDisk's clever FlashPath devices that will let you use the memory cards in a 3.5-inch floppy drive, or, for music, an audio cassette player.

FORBES: Ten O'Clock Tech: SmartDisk's Flash Media

SonicBlue (nasdaq: SBLU - news - people ) has a device with which you can record your CD collection on a hard drive and select hundreds of different ways to play music on your home audio system.

FORBES: Wireless's New Hot Spot

Both Cocoon audio docks feature the ability to stream directly from an iPhone, iPod, networked hard drive or USB thumb drives, delivering groundbreaking performance and flexibility in an iPod docking solution at any price.

ENGADGET: Denon intros Cocoon Home and Portable AirPlay docks, will transform songs into musical butterflies

Most of the VoIP technologies in use don't automatically compress the audio stream, so a preserved phone conversation takes up a fair amount of space on your hard drive, perhaps as much as a megabyte for a two-minute call.

FORBES: Magazine Article

The drive will include packet writing software for CD-RW and Cequadrat JustBurn for creating data and audio CDs.

CNN: Verbatim to ship first 4X CD-RW drive

It also includes an audio cable you can connect to your sound card so you can listen to music on the CD-R drive while using your CD-ROM for other tasks.

CNN: IDG.net - Recordable and rewritable CD drives: Permanent, portable storage