Audio Video News

Home-theater equipment continues to be one of the fastest-selling segments of the consumer electronics market, according to the most recent figures from the <A HREF="http://www.ce.org/">Consumer Electronics Association</A>. How good is it? Try $2 billion in factory-to-dealer sales of video equipment in the first quarter of this year. That's a 20% increase over the first three months of 1999, according to the May 31 report. The figure is even more astounding in light of 1999's growth, in which home theater revenues increased by 11% over 1998's totals.

Plasma, plasma, on the wall, who's the fairest speaker of them all? ("Fairest", of course, meaning "least visibly obnoxious while sitting next to one of those sleek, sexy, and usually silver-finish flat-panel TVs" with added elements of "gee, it'd be nice if it were easy to install - like maybe if the L, C, and R speakers were all one unit".) Boston Acoustics claims to have the answer with the new P400 slim theater speaker, a unique compound speaker unit that incorporates discrete left, center, and right front speakers in a single, thin chassis that's "designed to perfectly complement a 42-inch plasma or LCD television or monitor, a DLP rear-projection console, or a traditional screen."

Yes, Boston Acoustics knows all you plasma lovers out there hate speakers - or at least hate to look at speakers. (It's truly a love/hate relationship. You love to listen to good sound, but you hate to look at the speakers that are necessary to create it. My advice is that you should seek professional help about this, you know.)

Tele-Webbers---almost sounds like a mindless new children's TV show, but instead describes what a new report claims is the next big revolution in home television. According to the report from <A HREF="http://www.inteco.com">Inteco</A>, Tele-Webbers are the eight million adults in the US who use the Internet and watch TV simultaneously at least once a week. (So do another five million, but less often.)

We don't know about your family, but ever since we set up our big-screen HDTV and surround-sound speakers a couple years ago, we've been to the movies exactly . . . once. There's something about enjoying a film with all settings (picture quality,...

Russ Herschelmann (<I>Stereophile Guide to Home Theater</I>'s "Home Theater Architect") will be conducting a special two-day intensive home theater workshop on Saturday and Sunday, June 29&ndash;30, 2002, in Napa, California. For more information concerning what will be covered during the two-part event, go to <A HREF="http://www.home-theater-guy.com">www.home-theater-guy.com</A> and click on "Workshops."

Last week, the <A HREF="http://www.homepna.org">Home Phoneline Networking Alliance</A> (HomePNA) announced that new technology proposed earlier in March by <A HREF="http://www.lucent.com">Lucent</A> and Epigram (now a subsidiary of <A HREF="http://www.broadcom.com">Broadcom</A>) is now the basis for the 2.0 standard for 10 Megabit/second home networking technology.