LATEST ADDITIONS

Sats and sub and all that jazz.

One of my favorite wines is Riesling—German Riesling from the Mosel-Saar-Ruwer region. The grape is a noble specimen dating from 1435. NHT is like that hardy grape, which thrives in cool climates and stony ground. You'd expect a company that has changed hands repeatedly since its founding in 1986 to lose its identity, buffeted by the demands and indifference of successive owners. Instead, NHT has gone from strength to strength, entering their latest relationship with the Vinci Group of Colorado with a credible product lineup that represents several extended trains of thought, as well as a few new ones.

I go back a bit with Anthem. Years ago, with another publication, the Anthem AVM 20 and PVA 7 pre/pro and power amp combo were offered to me for review. I hadn't sought them out, but I knew the parent company Sonic Frontiers, and was very familiar with its other house brand, Paradigm loudspeakers, which I'd always liked and recommended to friends as Bose killers. What the hell, I thought.

Sling Media is best known for the Slingbox, which ferries your a/v fix from any home device to any computer in the home or over the net. This well-received technology is now multiplying into new uses in the wake of Sling Media's acquisition by EchoStar.

Well, DirecTv's new high definition channels are here and, er, what the heck were they thinking? On TNTHD, a station that existed as channel 75 before the hoopla and is now also shown on 245, "Save the Last Dance" is being shown in 4x3 stretch mode. Sci-Fi's high def incarnation is showing Merlin, a movie that was only shot in 4x3 (but at least they're not stretching it). USA is showing "Law & Order: CI" on their high def station properly, but in a weird-aspect challenged pillow box (black bars on all four sides) on their regular definition channel. A&E's has some high def shows that they're cropping and then stretching to 16x9 judging by the look of it. Only TBS's high def baseball game looks good enough that it gives me nothing to complain about – except that fact that the Yankees are losing.