There’ve been a lot of cool new product announcements coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show going on now in Las Vegas, including a new Palm phone based on their new WebOS, cheap/fast/durable flash-based hard drives, lots of Android-based devices that aren’t phones, network-connected televisions, and much else besides.

But one disappointment, to me at least, was the new audio system from Linksys, the consumer electronics brand of Cisco.  It looks to me like a straight knockoff of the highly-regarded Sonos wireless music system; they both let you stream music over your home wireless network to devices attached to your stereo.  Sonos uses their own setup, while Linksys uses regular wifi.  They both have nice remotes — the Sonos one is supposed to be gorgeous — and they’re both $1,000 and up.  I was really hoping that the Cisco announcement was going to be a cheap little box that attaches to your stereo to let you stream music from your computer.

That to me is an unmet need in the market still.

Besides Sonos and the new Linksys system, there is the relatively new Logitech Duet derived from Logitech’s acquisition of Slim Devices.  The Duet is cheaper, around $330, and uses an open source streaming server, Squeeze Center, that has lots of nice add-ons.  It too has a nice remote, which makes sense: Logitech has a line of very good Harmony universal remotes (I love ours).  But the kicker is that you can’t buy and configure the little wifi ‘receiver’ (it’s unamplified) without the remote.  I don’t want to spend $330 and I don’t want another remote in my house.

The Apple Airport Express has been around now for several years and it is pretty close to what I’m looking for; it’s got wifi and audio out and theoretically should connect iTunes to your stereo.  I say theoretically because I’ve got one and it’s connected to both my wifi network and physically to my stereo; iTunes sees it but it doesn’t work, presumably because it wants some Apple-flavored wireless love.  Crucially, for that setup, Apple has a free and very nice app that lets you control your music via the iPhone.

But it’s crazy that this is not a problem that hasn’t been solved in a hundred different ways.  There’s lots of good music streaming software out there with published open standards and all that; the issue isn’t on the software side.  It’s that no one has a simple wifi audio box that hooks up to your stereo.