Every product needs a target market, and Pioneer’s put their sites on the lucrative dance community with a trio of new boomboxes that make it easy to put together a routine, or just bust out some moves on a street corner.
Distinguished by the calibre of speakers in each unit, the company’s new Steez line comes in three flavours: the $US299 Solo, the $US349 Duo and the $US499 Crew, all dropping in November. Their unique housings all give them a distinct personality as well, but otherwise the feature sets look pretty similar between them. You’ll have to be picky with your playlists since each unit’s only got four gigs of storage on board, but dancers should appreciate the Steez’s various playback modes they won’t really find anywhere else.
Tempo control lets the speed of the current song be adjusted, without affecting its pitch, while customisable cue points make it easy to find a particular point in a given track. 8-Beat Skip lets you jump forward and back by eight counts, though it requires your playlist to be first analysed by the included Mixtrax software which denotes BPM and other info for each track. An Auto DJ Mode will automatically cue up similar songs by genre or speed, complete with transitions between each track, and last, but certainly not least fresh, is an Auto Battle Mode letting users choose songs and compete against other dancers, cued by an official countdown and voice prompts. [Pioneer Steez via Engadget]