Small sounds good on the road or in the air

By RUSSELL BAILLIE entertainment editor

As someone who - apart from working through a pile of CDs to review each week - just needs music and plenty of it to enhance brain function, figuring out how best to cart it on my travels has caused consternation, shoulders dented by CD-heavy hand luggage, and quite a few dud purchases.

A couple of the aforementioned sit near my desk - my second pair of battery-powered mini-speakers designed to be used with a walkman.

I'm yet to hear a pair that have any fidelity, low or high. And they eat batteries.

But having seen a glowing review in an American magazine, I've just bought (and am yet to roadtest) two Olympia Soundbugs for US$75 ($160) over the net.

Devices about the size of a computer mouse, they come with a suction cup which attaches to any smooth surface and effectively turns the object into a resonating speaker.

So your hotel-room mirror, window, bedside table or the bald guy who delivers room service can become part of your portable stereo system.

You can run them from your work laptop in CD-play mode or discman. And yes, it would probably work on your tray table or airliner window but that would just be rude to your fellow passengers.

Anyway, the best thing to take on planes are a pair of Sony MDR-NC5 noise-cancelling headphones.

Not only to do they fold up neatly for portability, you can plug them into the airline system and get far better sound quality for inflight movies than the complimentary set.

They're "active" care of a AAA-battery and emit a signal to cancel out background noise such as engine hum or the screaming of the kid in the row behind you.

Combined with the pressure changes of altitude, they can make your ears feel a little strange after a while. But they're light and comfortable and there's a satisfying smugness to returning the airline's rubbish headphones without having taken them out of the Cellophane.

Having worn out quite a few CD walkmans over the years, I've recently made the leap to a Sony mini-disc player - the Net MD version which allows me to use my PC at home to quickly download CDs on to disc.

The mini-disks take up a fraction of the room or weight of that pile of CDs, and the CD booklet won't be missed as when you're downloading to disc you can write in the song titles which will then show on the player's LCD display.

There are other advantages of the mini-disc. It has a robust "bump" protection and runs on a single rechargeable AA-battery. Its compact, cigarette-packet size also allows it to comfortably fit in a shirt pocket, unlike a CD walkman which, when left behind in a car or hotel room, is the first thing that will get pinched.

But as a portable personal stereo, the MD's main superiority is how much music it holds. Usually, you get two or three CD albums on one after-dinner-mint-sized mini-disc with no discernible sound quality loss - more if you compressed the files, which causes a relative loss in audio standard.

Changing a disk once or twice in a long-haul flight is better than ferreting through your bag on the hour for yet another CD and more batteries.

Drawbacks? Well, once you land you might find your rental car comes with a CD player.

However, if it's got a tape deck just whip out that cassette car stereo adaptor you've so wisely added to your portable music kit.

Surfing through the local radio stations can offer all sorts of insights into the culture. But be warned: they can also be as terrible as the ones back home.