Mike Wood

Getting big is easy. Just lift weights and eat as much as you can. Losing weight is a little harder: less food, more exercise. The trick is adding muscle mass without adding excess fat. Serious fitness competitors endure grueling weight-lifting workouts and major cardio routines, and they eat frequent low-fat, low-calorie meals to bulk up and stay lean. Sharp has accomplished this same trick with their AQUOS LCD display line without the expensive gym membership.

The consumer electronics industry has a unique way of making a mess of things. Take HDTV, for example. Competing and completely different connection standards have made a mess of what should be a simple but substantial advancement in picture quality. Analog connections are fine, but they don't have the copy-protection capability to appease content providers. Then there's IEEE 1394, a copy-protected and network-enabled solution that only works with displays that have built-in HDTV decoders. Finally, you have the digital visual interface (DVI), a modified computer-display connection. DVI works well with satellite and cable systems that use interactive program guides, but it uses an expensive connection type that's difficult to run longer than 10 to 15 feet.

Have you considered room acoustics? That's my first question when people ask me for home theater advice. Your theater's acoustic environment is as important to your system's sound quality as any single component. Sure, you can improve the sound with a new amplifier, new speakers, or the latest and greatest EX/ES processor; however, if your room isn't acoustically optimized, you still won't get maximum performance from your system, no matter how much it costs. Adding acoustic treatment is probably the easiest and most effective thing you can do to improve your sonic environment. Granted, it can be daunting to calculate reverberation times so that you add the right amount of acoustic treatment. Fortunately, Performance Media Industries (PMI) has done the work for you with their CinePanel acoustic-treatment kits.

Yes, you heard right, kiddies. The plasma antichrist (me) is performing a comparison of eight mostly industrial-strength plasma displays. Will I deride them all? Probably. Will their beauteous splendor turn me to the dark side? Possibly. Will I lose my mind in the process? Read on to find out.