The iWow turns your tunes into HD audio

While your iPod, iPad and iPhone are revolutionary devices for listening to your music, they also come with some revolutionary pains in the rear end. The sound quality of your mp3 tracks can be all over the place. The volume difference between tracks is not unlike the audio shock you get when watching a quiet, atmospheric film and the network suddenly cuts to an obnoxiously loud ShamWow commercial.

The ideal solution isn’t just to make the quality of your mp3s consistent -- the ideal solution is to make all the quality of all your mp3s fabulous, HD and awesome.

The ideal solution is a little conversion unit that debuted at Macworld 2012, the iWow-U. The iWow-U is an inconspicuous little dongle that upconverts your regular music and movie audio to full-fledged HD audio. The “U” in iWow-U stands for “universal,” as this baby works on not only Apple products, but also an Android phone, a laptop, a tablet, an e-reader -- anything with a 3.5mm headphone jack.

The iWow-U is a spin-off of SRS Labs’ iWow 3D, which delivers the same optimized bass, treble and upconverted HD audio but is designed exclusively for iOS devices. The iWow-U works with any audio-delivering mobile device, digging in to the file’s source material to locate and restore the audio details buried in there.

“It delivers clear sound, better bass, improved vocals and basically making your music or audio sound like it’s high-definition instead of standard definition,” SRS Labs’ Michael Farino said in an interview. “It makes movies sound like you’re actually in the theater.”

SRS Labs debuted the iWow-U at Macworld and expects to make this audio enhancement device available in March. iOS peeps can get their hands on the iWow 3D, which is available now.

For more of Allvoices' coverage of Macworld | iWorld 2012, check out allvoices.com/macworld2012.