LATEST ADDITIONS

Tom Norton  |  Nov 14, 2007

I don't count myself a big fan of this widely praised film. It was directed by Steven Spielberg during his "good aliens" period&mdash;a period that included the far superior <I>ET: The Extraterrestrial.</I>

Tom Norton  |  Nov 14, 2007
Ratatouille, Cars, and Pixar Short Films Collection
Mark Fleischmann  |  Nov 14, 2007
I keep up with new surround-receiver features the way a CIA analyst monitors intel from dangerous nations. A lot of these things are just distractions from the fundamentals: dynamics, noise, etc. But I'm in love with the latest wrinkle in connectivity, the front-panel USB jack. At first I thought, yawn, a way to plug in your Windows PlaysForSure music player, as if you had such a thing. But you can also plug in a plain old USB drive. Think of this: You bump your 10 newest favorite songs to a flash drive, plug that sucker into the front panel, and use the remote to get the show rolling. If you have a whole drawer full of those things, each one can become a playlist. Better yet, why not get some use out of the external hard drive you use to protect your download collection from a deadly crash? Or better still, why not buy another external hard drive just for use with the receiver? I just paid $120 for a 500GB Iomega external drive to back up my backups (I'm careful that way). That's much less than the cost of a fancy hard-drive-based audio server. It's also just about what you'd pay for an add-on iPod dock. Kudos to Pioneer, which introduced me to the feature with the VSX-94TXH ($1600), and Integra, maker of the DTR-8.8 ($2400) I'm reviewing at the moment. Let's hope USB trickles down to less costly models.
Krissy Rushing  |  Nov 14, 2007

<I>Who says a home theater has to be a dungeon? Inspired by the homeowners' backyard, this theater brings the outdoors in.</I>

Joe Klusnick  |  Nov 13, 2007  |  First Published: Nov 14, 2007

<I>For my first true home theater, I didn't mess around.</I>

Mark Fleischmann  |  Nov 13, 2007
Sir Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony, has finally conceded what other observers have been saying for some time: The format war between Blu-ray and HD DVD is stalled in a stalemate.

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