Shane Buettner

I finally made it over to Thiel’s live demonstration featuring the CS3.7 floorstanders with the just announced SCS4 bookshelf speakers pulling center channel and surround duties. And wouldn’t you know this was another one of the few places in the entire CEDIA Expo at which one could actually hear some music?

On the show floor Saturday I spotted industry veteran rep and all around good guy Phil Callahan, who was nursing a bruised ego due to the pounding Notre Dame was receiving from Michigan on the football field. Being the professional he is Phil sucked it up and introduced me to new-ish client Leon speakers and its main man Jeff Gordon (not that Jeff Gordon).

Anchor Bay Technologies announced the availability of DVDO’s most ambitious video processor yet, the iScan VP50. In addition to offering the ability to scale 480i/p, 720p and 1080i to 1080p, the new model can properly deinterlace 1080i to 1080p using Anchor Bay’s new HD Precision Deinterlacing algorithm. It features several HDMI inputs and can also accept and process 1080p signals and uses 10-bit processing throughout.

I know- that’s a badly overused pun. But at the insistence of editor Tom Norton and contributing writer/reviewer Randy Tomlinson I found Revel’s off-site demo of its new Salon2 loudspeaker, which is targeted to come it at around $22K/pr. And will be joined in the Ultima line by matched center and surround speakers.