"Two hundred channels and nothing to watch!" How many times have you felt that way? Or maybe you've wanted to finish watching a DVD in another room but didn't have a second player. Or wished you could keep an eye on the kids outside without sitting in the sweltering heat. Or wanted to see the video display from your iPod docked in another room.
The iPhone has been stealing all the media buzz lately, but what about Apple's other radical offering, iTunes Plus? As I wrote in my July/August column (also available at soundandvisionmag.com), Apple and EMI have decided to sell music without any Digital Rights Management. They're charging extra for those downloads ($1.29 each vs.
"X-Factors" probably aren't the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a place to buy a home theater. But for Jared Lewis, founder of Homewood, Alabama-based Audio Video Excellence (www.avxinc.com; 205-871-7289), they set his custom installation business apart from the competition.
Sharp is a progressive company and, while they might not categorize themselves as Heroes, their 3.2 $B expansion in Sakai City (Osaka) is designed not just for making energy saving LCDs, but also for expanding production of energy producing solar cells. TFT LCDs and thin-film solar cells depend on the same thin-film technology so improvements in LCD production will trickle over solar cell development as well.
Sharp introduced their first BD player for the US market, the not-unreasonably priced BD-HP20U ($549). The player boasts full 1080/24p output capability via its HDMI 1.3 output. The player also has component output if your high def set is old school.
Sony did show the successor to the wildy popular Pearl projector, the VPL-VW60 (now, sub-$5K), which as you can see is a classy charcoal gray. Sony is claiming further improvements in its SXRD chips have yielded significant contrast ration gains, the the image overall is brighter, and the blacks are still fantastic with the latest version of its auto iris technology.
The BDP-S2000ES picks up where the vaunted Sony DVD players of the past left off. A massively overbuilt chassis, a hermeticaly shielded transport and all other srots of gooodies. According to the Sony folks on site, the player will decode Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD High Resolution audio, but not DTS-HD Master Audio. It is also claimed that the player will output TrueHD and DTS-HD in native bitstream form over HDMI 1.3.
News of Sony's VPL-V60 SXRD front projector, a sub-$5K successor to the incomparably popular Pearl had already leaked to the 'Net days ago. OK, so did the news of the high-end projector, but it's still cool and here's the straight dope.
