John Sciacca

You can usually tell how popular – or good – a demo is at CEDIA by how steady and long the line is, and on the last day of the show, when many integrators had already left Denver to return home, one of the booth’s that was still drawing a steady crowd for its surround demonstration was Klipsch's sound room where the company debuted its new Pro Cinema Home surround system. And the experience was definitely worth the wait!

Tons of people use Amazon Alexa Echo smart speakers around their homes as an inexpensive way of utilizing voice control for a variety of tasks, and while the Echo is great in this role, it kinda sucks as an audio speaker. Klipsch wants to do something about that with its new KVA-40 and KVA-110 Echo Input Amplifiers that keep everything that’s good about the Echo while kicking the audio performance up several notches.

Want to watch the new movie Joker on opening night in the comfort of your own home theater? Red Carpet Home Cinema has a system that can make that happen…provided you can pay for the privilege.

Most AVRs have the same, plain, bland look to them. Black chassis, couple of knobs, some buttons, and a two-line LCD display that provides some basic information. NAD has given its new T 778 Reference AVR a gorgeous facelift in the form of a sleek TFT touch display that can be used for full front panel setup as well as provide information during operation, such as VU meters during playback or metadata while streaming music. Of course, because it’s from NAD, the T 778 is also packed with some pretty serious hardware to ensure pristine sound quality.