Tom Norton

The critical and box office verdicts on <I>Flyboys</I> weren't exactly glowing. Full of clichs with the usual assortment of standard characters…the dull subplot about the lonely American pilot falling for a beautiful young French girl…wooden dialog...a decidedly old-fashioned tone. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

In-wall subs are a fast growing category, and BG has its own wrinkle on the concept. The company's new BX-4850 in-wall subwoofer consists of four modules, each of which contains 12 micro-woofers. One of these modules is shown in the photo. The four modules may be positioned together in the room or separately, and an on-wall version may also be made available. The 12 micro-woofers are each separately enclosed and face each other in pairs. The bass generated by them fires out from the center of the array, through the opening between the left and right sets of drivers, and into the room. Mechanical vibrations are largely cancelled out due to the opposing drivers, minimizing the transmission of bass into the walls, which can muddy the bass and transmit low frequencies to the structure of the room and into other parts of the house.

Panasonic's heart may be in plasma displays, but the company also launched a new line of LCD rear projection TVs at CES. There will be six models, three of them 1080p and three 720p. Each series will be available in 61-56-and 50-inch sizes. But the big news is that they all will use a new form of projection lamp, called LiFi, from LUXIM. This lamp is said to provide a much longer life than current UHP lamps, with a faster startup time and a wider color gamut that challenges the color available from the LED lamp-replacement that is just starting to show up in other RPTVs.

SVS is a company that specializes in subwoofers, sold mostly on-line. They had one of the few home theater demos at the Venetian, and the only one that actually used film as a program source. I know, that's tacky in a venue in which 99% of the demos are 2-channel audio, but they did their best.