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Hi-Fi Corner: The world’s first wood touch panel makes B&O’s BeoSound Moment totally unique

Bang & Olufsen used the CES 2015 stage to reveal the Beosound Moment, a unique wireless music streaming device unlike anything we’ve seen before. The streamer features a wooden touch panel — an industry first, according to B&O — and a unique interface that gathers any media on a local network (including an iTunes library) together with music streaming service, Deezer, and any of 70,000 available Internet radio stations, into a beautiful touchscreen interface.

As you’ll see in our video, the Moment comes with its own platform, and can be flipped to use either the simple wooden touch interface, or the more familiar touchscreen. Be sure to check out the “mood music” feature, which intuits mood based on a color wheel, allowing for granular differentiation between sad, really sad, and extremely sad (or happy, angry, etc).

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Bluetooth is also supported for streaming directly from devices, if desired. The system works on the WiSA wireless standard, so you’ll either need to invest in a set of B&O’s wireless speakers, or look to one of the other few WiSA-compliant speakers, including Klipsch’s Reference Premiere Wireless lineup, in order to listen.

At $2700, the Moment comes at a premium price, but it clearly delivers a premium experience to match. To be sure, there’s nothing else like it on the market. Would you expect anything less from Bang & Olufsen?

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If you're a newcomer to the world of cigars or just bought a brand-new humidor, you'll need to season it. And no, I'm not saying to add salt and pepper to it. If you've never heard of it, you might ask, "What is seasoning for a humidor?"

Don't think you need to flavor the box or anything — seasoning is really about getting the wood inside your humidor so as not to rob your cigars of precious moisture. Easy to understand, and getting it done is relatively straightforward as well. The trick is figuring out the "why," and we'll get into that in a bit. But let's first discuss seasoning a humidor.

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Sports are synonymous with celebration. After winning the biggest trophy of their lives, athletes want to indulge in the payoff that comes with seeing their dreams realized. Teams go into the locker room, where a waterfall of champagne hits them in the eyes, and swimming goggles seem to be a requirement, lest you walk around on the best night of your life half blind. While drinking is often the activity of choice after winning a championship, the NBA has an alternative symbol of greatness that other sports don't use nearly enough: the victory cigar.

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Throughout TV's long history, the medical drama has occupied a somewhat unique place in the landscape. Medical shows are often some of the most reliable on TV precisely because there's so much drama built in to working in a hospital.

Personally, I've found the medical drama to be deeply comforting for years, even if I have no desire to be a doctor myself. Understanding the stress of people in the healthcare profession is fascinating in and of itself.

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