Fred Manteghian

Sunfire announced their upcoming Theater Grand Receiver 3 (TGR-3) as part of their premium XT series of components. While it isn't rated as powerful as their dedicated multi-channel amps, I don't know anyone who would complain about having 200 watts times seven channels in their receiver. In fact, Sunfire claims the TGR-3 is the world's most power receiver. Sunfire's trademarked Tracking Donwconverter technology allows you move power from the wheels that slip to the wheels that grip. Oh wait, that's my car. Actually, having used a Sunfire Cinema Grand Signature amplifier as a reference for over 3 years, I can attest to the fact that their technology works as advertised.

Xperiment, a maker of music and movie whole house systems for custom installers has some interesting, albeit expensive products. But expensive as they are, they really do do a lot and compared to some of their competitors, they're sort of midline in price. Xperiment just struck a deal with Music Giants to download music and movies into one of their high end servers. Their servers, Poseidon and Polaris, offer between 1.5 and 4.0 Terabytes of raided storage for prices that closely mirror what corporation pay to protect their data. Of course, I don't know if you need that much protection for, say, <i>Godfather III</i>, but it's nice to know it's there. A top end server, the Poseidon, is $25,000 and each room where you want control needs a "client" which features a DVD player/reader (from $2,400 to $3,000). Everything is connected with Ethernet and the whole system can even synch with your other system at your vacation home in the Hamptons while jet over there for the weekend.

ProjectionDesign has a unique solution for high end custom installer. Their Action Model Three 1080 projector, using a single 1080p DLP chip, but is equipped with two lamps and two color wheels. In other words, the projector has two light paths that are recombined before being sent out the lens. ProjectionDesign claims that this eliminates rainbows, and in ten minutes of viewing, I only saw one rainbow that wasn't caused by rapidly turning my head. I'm real sensitive to color rainbows, so I'll have to say they succeeded.

Conducting an audio demonstration on the open show floor is usually only done for the wow factor. As in "Wow, that's loud. Would you mind turning it down or putting air shocks on it so you could drive it out of here?" The Lipinskis (Lukas' dad Andrew was in town too) had five of their 707 speakers setup in as workmanlike a fashion as you might expect given their surroundings. Without missing a beat, Lukas asked me to sit down. Even given the ambient noise, the five channel Manhattan Transfer recording he played for me was impressive. The true timbre of the speakers could still easily be heard through the surrounding ruckus. Lukas said that, noise aside, the open show floor is otherwise preferable to most of the hotel rooms he gets at other shows.