<I>UAV</I> will be temporarily relocating its headquarters this week as Tom Norton, Fred Manteghian and I head to Denver to cover the 2007 CEDIA Expo. CEDIA, which is very focused on home theater, has in many ways supplanted CES as the big show in our corner of the industry in recent years. Coming as it does in the fall, ahead of the big holiday shopping season, many companies use CEDIA to launch significant new products.
In many respects, AV receivers haven't changed much in recent years. There have been no major breakthroughs in amplifier design. 7.1-channels aren't that new. Multichannel analog inputs have been a fixture for some time. Dolby Digital and DTS have been with us since the Jurassic Age—or at least since <I>Jurassic Park</I>. And FM and AM sections are about as exciting as <I>Halloween 14</I>.
There are several fears surrounding the U.S. transition to digital television broadcasting in 2009 and one of them relates to the set-top boxes that would keep old analog sets running. The federal government will attempt to allay that fear by awarding as many as two $40 coupons per household to help viewers buy the digital-to-analog devices. Judging from what's happening in the U.K., that looks pretty generous.
