Tunes to cook by.

• Position: What's New?

* As glamorous and exciting as TV cooking shows may make it seem, working around the kitchen is an often-boring activity. Listening to music as you work helps to make chores less tedious, but counter space is usually at a premium, and room for a radio and/or CD player is hard to do. Thumbing through the Hammacher-Schlemmer Living Well catalogue found us a solution, though--the Sony TV/Weather/FM/ AM CD Kitchen Clock Radio.

Admittedly, the name is a bit of a jawbreaker, but this multifunctional unit is ideal for space conservation because it bypasses the counter completely, mounting to the bottom of a kitchen cabinet with just three screws. Its slim silhouette--3 1/2" high x 13" wide x 4 1/2" deep-takes up a minimum of space, and thus is extremely unobtrusive, not that its sleek control panel is unattractive in its own right. The device's four-band digital tuner provides access not only to FM and AM stations, but weather band and television channel audio as well. The CD player, in turn, allows you to pop in your favorite tunes and listen to CDRs and CD-RWs, too. An array of buttons across the face lets you preset up to 25 stations, regulate the volume, and select CD tracks, shuttling forward and back as you choose, including repeat modes. Meanwhile, the LCD readout of the clock...