I would really like to wake up to my choice of music with no commercials and no annoying commentary so I started looking into CD alarm clocks. Most of the ones that I could find were huge (covering most of a night stand), ugly (like an 80's boom box), had terrible sound quality, and around $80. I then looked over at the so-called "shelf systems", mini-component systems that fit on an office bookshelf. They have sleaker designs, much better sound, remote controls (which take up very little nightstand area), and averaged around $100 (for a 3-disc changer!)...BUT NO FRIGGIN' ALARM.

These shelf systems have clocks and sleep functions to turn off, but no timer to turn it on. How stupid are the people working at these companies that they can't figure out that they should just put a timer on the device..and they should make sure that the remote's numeric keypad can be used to set the clock and alarms as well having buttons to turn off the alarm or snooze. Maybe they're not stupid, but it seems like a pretty damn obvious thing to do to me also that it would be a good idea. If somebody out there knows of any CD player that is decent enough to wake up to and includes an alarm clock then please let me know.

I know I can use my computer to do this, but then I have to leave it (and the speakers) on while I'm sleeping and that's an egregious waste of electricity. So then I built a robot to turn on my normal sound system in the morning, but the robot got in the way during the daytime. So I ended up with a Memorex CD Alarm clock for $50 that is basically a Discman with attached low-end computer speakers. For reasons that I won't bother listing, this thing blows. I'm looking for better options.