God bless the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). This fearless defender of everything that’s right, moral and upstanding has allowed ISPs to advertise fantasy headline speeds and limited “unlimited” packages for donkey’s years, but when it comes to the really big issues, it’s not afraid to wield the big stick.

The latest victim of the ASA’s wrath is 3GA Ltd, the company that makes the Brennan JB7 –  “a CD player with a hard disk that stores up to 5,000 CDs”.

The adverts for the Brennan highlight the convenience of ripping your entire CD collection to the device – much like we’ve all been doing for years on our PCs, iPods and other MP3 players.

However, somebody with nothing better to do with their life (or, more likely, one of Brennan’s competitors) complained that the “ad incited consumers to break the law, because it was illegal to copy music without permission from the copyright owner”.

This is, of course, technically correct: format shifting is indeed illegal in the UK, despite companies such as Apple making hundreds of millions of pounds by tacitly encouraging people to do just that.

But this isn’t Apple – it’s 3GA Ltd, a small company that likely doesn’t have a legal department nor a multi-million marketing machine to fight its battles. And despite the fact that (to the best of my knowledge) nobody’s ever been prosecuted for format shifting, the ASA has decided to take offence to advertising this everyday practice.

“We considered the overall impression of the ad was such that it encouraged consumers and businesses to copy CDs, vinyl and cassettes,” the ASA adjudication states. “In the absence of prominent explanation, we concluded that the ad misleadingly implied it was acceptable to copy CDs, vinyl and cassettes without the permission of the copyright owner. We also considered that the ad encouraged people to use the advertised product in this way and that, therefore, it incited consumers to break the law.”

We can all sleep a little easier in our beds tonight, safe in the knowledge this dangerous outlaw has been dealt with.

Apple’s earbuds could be easily added to that list. It’s become something of a truism – both in PC Pro and the wider world – that the headphones supplied with Apple iPods/iPhones are as offensive on the ear as Janet Street-Porter with a megaphone. Well, I, for one am prepared to stand up for Apple’s white delights. I’ve owned an iPod/iPhone for five years or more, and I’ve never found a compelling reason to part with the headphones supplied in the box.

Here are five reasons why:

1. They don’t sound that bad

Yes, there’s no doubt that Sony or Sennheiser’s finest offer superior sound quality to the Apple earbuds, but most people simply won’t notice the difference. When you’re listening to your iPod with a backdrop of clattering Tube train or traffic-saturated high street, all those delicate subtleties offered by the more expensive models are drowned out anyway.

Even in pristine listening conditions, many people can’t tell the difference between Apple’s bog-standard buds and premium headphones. When asked to rate various types of headphone out of ten in our Real World Quality Test feature, our panel of 20 everyday consumers gave  Apple’s earbuds an average rating of 6.1 out of ten, only marginally behind a £180 pair of Sennheiser IE8 headphones, which scored 7.1.

In short, the Apple earbuds are “good enough” for most – which is why you still see their familiar white cable snaking out of the jacket of most people on the Tube.

2. They’re robust

In the five years or so I’ve owned an iPod/iPhone, I can’t recall having to throw away a single pair of Apple earbuds because the cable has frayed or the earbuds have disintegrated – unlike countless other pairs of in-ear headphones I’ve owned over the years.

3. They’re not THAT leaky

The best case for the prosecution against the Apple earbuds is that they have all the acoustic insulation of a washing machine. Indeed, this very morning on the way into work there was a girl who managed to alienate the entire carriage with the burble of beats emanating from her standard Apple earbuds.

There’s no doubt that Apple’s headphones would benefit from those rubber tips that seal the ear canal. But blaming Apple for leaky sound is like blaming next-door’s Doberman for not clearing up the number two it left on your drive this morning: the owner is to blame. Apple’s headphones don’t irritate fellow commuters, unless you have the iPod turned up to eardrum-perforating levels.

4. The jack doesn’t obstruct buttons

This sounds like a ridiculously trivial point, but it isn’t. I’ve lost count of the number of alternative headphones that have the jack (or tip, ring, sleeve connector, to give it its proper name) jutting out at 90 degrees, obscuring the iPod’s lock button or rendering an iPhone case impossible to use.  Apple is seemingly the only company to realise that a headphone jack that sits flush with the player isn’t always desirable.

5. They’re a fashion statement

There’s no doubt in my mind that part of the appeal of the Apple earbuds is that they identify you as an iPhone/iPod owner. That distinctive cable marks you out as a member of a premium club, in the same way as the Ray Ban logo on your sunglasses or a Nike swoosh on your trainers. I’ll wager that it’s the second biggest reason why brand-conscious teenagers (and if we’re being honest, some of us grown-ups) don’t ditch the earbuds, behind the inescapable advantage of them being free.

On a recent edition of Dragons’ Den, Jason Roberts, founder and CEO of a company called Tech21, managed to convince Peter Jones and Theo Paphitis to part with £150,000 (in return for a 40% stake in his business) for what is effectively a range of laptop bags, MP3 player and mobile phone cases.

Doesn’t sound that exciting, does it? But there is something rather special that lies at the heart of his apparently mundane products – a fabric called called d3o. This is an impact-absorbing material, that’s becoming increasingly popular in the world of protective clothing – it’s been used by the military, the US downhill ski team, and motorcycle clothing manufacturers to provide impact protection in the event of a crash.

What’s clever about it is that it’s soft and flexible in its natural state but goes hard on impact, as Mr Roberts ably demonstrated on a recent visit to PC Pro. He extracted a large lump of what looked like orange goo from his bag – the goo, he told us, was the raw material behind d3o.

Then he placed it in on the table and proceeded to hit it with his fist with the sort of impact that would have been enough break his knuckles with nothing in the way; but he didn’t even wince. We tried it too, and it didn’t hurt a bit. He hit it with a mallet and it hardly changed shape. Then he rolled it into a sphere and bounced it on the desk like a rubber ball.

It’s truly fascinating stuff, and it drew universal interest when I touted it around the office. The applications for it seem endless, and others clearly agree. Just check out the list of products detailed on the d3o website and you’ll see why.

We’re not so convinced how useful the iPod nano “iBand” made of this stuff will be (available from the Apple online store for £19.95), but I’ll be first in line for a protective laptop or camera bag.

We’ve been hands-on with Sony’s latest addition to the Walkman family at the London launch and, while it’ll have to go some way to beat the all-conquering iPod Touch and iPhone duopoly, we’ve come away impressed.

Sony is emphasising the sheer quality afforded by the new Walkman and, on first impressions, it’s hard to disagree: the unit itself, while small and light, felt more than solid enough to cope with pockets and backpacks, and the four sides of the X-series are covered in a stylish mottled pattern that lends the Walkman a bit of personality aside from the familiar logos plastered all over it.

The OLED touchscreen itself carries on the theme of quality: it feels practically as responsive as the screens on Apple’s products, is pretty sharp and bright and, with a height of three inches and resolution of 432 x 240, large enough to display album covers, videos and pictures, as well as the web thanks to the in-built WLAN and browser. A direct link to YouTube is also provided, as is an area for managing podcasts, and the touchscreen is accompanied by hardware controls for music on top and a ‘Home’ button at the bottom.

Sound quality seemed up to muster, too, with plenty of rich bass complimenting snappy, accurate treble. Sony is talking up its noise-cancelling technology – it’s claiming that the X-series if the world’s first mp3 and video player with digital noise cancellation – but our first impressions suggest that the cancellation is subtle rather than intrusive. The player has three noise cancellation modes – for trains, planes and offices – so we’ll test those more thoroughly when we get our hands on the X-series for review.

The new Sony X-series is available in any colour as long as it’s black and, while not having the thousands of applications of the iPod Touch, is looking like it could be a rival: excellent sound quality, a vivid and responsive touchscreen and a decent range of features should appeal to those who value the sound of their music over Apple’s legendary design. Prices rival Apple’s, too: £209 inc VAT for the 16GB model and £279 for double that capacity.

Will it be worth the cash? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below, and keep checking the PC Pro site for a review soon.

How brilliant is that? IBM pulled the family card, and what a card it is… because obviously when a man decides to upsticks from Texas to California, to throw 26 years of his life in a truck and turn his back on his friends, he does so on a whim. He wakes up in the morning and says “honey, forget the toast, I’ve decided to ditch my suit for a polo neck and work for Apple, I don’t know if there’s a position available but by lord I intend to find out. I’ve spent nineteen years designing servers and now I want to follow my dreams… what do you mean the children? Oh, who cares, Tom’s always been a nuissance… his name’s Mark you say, well that proves it. Come along darling, the bus for Cupertino’s waiting!”

Erm no. Papermaster took this decision with the full backing of his children – who no doubt have dreams of ballponds filled with iPods – and his wife, who’s probably relishing the prospect of the next 26 years without any server pillow-talk whatsoever.

I don’t know whether the comment shows a particularly cack-handed attempt at man-management from one of the world’s great technology companies, or rather a touching last-ditch attempt to keep hold of a man it clearly values. On the other hand, if you take the comment out of the cosy surrounds of the office, and place it in the mouth of a shadowy figure, standing behind a pair of beaming headlights in the parking garage – it all goes a little bit mafioso.

Oh well, the point remains this entire thing is becoming a bit of a guilty pleasure. I imagine this is what all those surreptitious Big Brother watchers feel like. Anyway, I await with baited breath the next thwack of the Papermaster pinata, and whatever delights fall out.

I played with the Blik RadioStation a while back, and I must admit that I was thoroughly impressed. It was the first combined DAB, FM and Wi-Fi radio I’d seen, and the sound quality was good enough to easily bag it a recommended award.

Not content to rest on its laurels, though, Blik has thrown another audio source in to its new model. Now you get three flavours of radio and an iPod dock. In the time-honoured tradition of iPod accessories, the model name has been preceded with a meaningless “i”, to become the iBlik.

None of us here in the labs have an iPod, so it’s my duty to admit that the above image is a cunning mock-up. We wouldn’t want to deceive you here at Pro. We’ll test it out and get back to you, but if the dock’s sound quality can match that of the radio inputs then it has nothing to worry about.

Within five minutes of taking the bread-loaf sized device out of the box, we had it connected to our Wi-Fi network, thanks to a commendably simple set-up wizard, although entering our router’s WPA key with the Noxon’s quirky remote control was akin to trying to spell egalitarianism. Backwards.

The Noxon handily places a folder of “local UK radio stations” at the top of the menu, to help you get started. Unfortunately, it was completely devoid of stations, leading us to spend a futile 15 minutes wondering if the radio was actually connecting to our wireless router. A brief blast of Love FM from San Marino (where, incidentally, Mick Hucknall is still very big) confirmed the connection was live, and indeed we eventually managed to locate stations closer to home by digging through the country-by-country menus. Noxon’s UK shortcut is, therefore, something of a cul-de-sac.

Although we’ve only briefly trialled a few radio stations, podcasts and a brief spot of catch-up Radio 2 with Jonathan Ross, the sound quality from the built-in speaker is perfectly capable of filling a room, although it was so base-heavy out of the box that Ross sounded more like Barry White. A tweak with the equaliser restored him to his normal lisp-heavy glory.

Overall, a mildly impressive start, but is there really enough in this black box of tricks to justify the £240 price tag? Keep an eye out for our full review next week.