OTHER TECH

The second hard-disk dynamo is SonicBlue's innovative RTV4080 Replay TV video recorder ($999, reviewed in April). Of all its many features, perhaps the most intriguing, according to reviewer Michael Antonoff, is its ability to make commercials "go poof! in the blink of an eye - and without having to touch the remote during the program." Unlike VCRs or earlier hard-drive recorders where you had to hit some kind of "quick skip" button to jump over ads, the RTV4080 has a nifty Commercial Advance feature that identifies blocks of ads and automatically ignores them during playback. Even though it doesn't always work as advertised, sometimes cutting off a show's theme song or leaving commercial blocks intact, some salvation is better than none. And you can still skip ahead manually if you have to.

If you want to get really geeky, you (or a heavily compensated installer) can hook the RTV4080 up to your broadband home network so you can send recorded programs to SonicBlue 4000 series recorders in other rooms of your house. Once you do, you can access a program stored on any hard drive from any of the other machines.

But why just send programs around the house when the RTV4080 will let you achieve the absolute heights of geeky coolness by sending them over the Internet as well? Of course, it takes about 8 hours to transfer a half-hour sitcom even at the lowest-quality video setting and with a superfast broadband connection, but you can instruct the SonicBlue to do the transfer in the background while you're watching another program, or overnight.

Given that I've just been loudly singing the praises of hard-disk devices, why am I about to recommend adding something as antiquated as a VCR to your system? Because it's a digital VCR that can connect to a TV via a FireWire port and record high-def digital programs in the D-VHS format. Mitsubishi's HS-HD2000U ($1,049, reviewed in February/March) can also record programs the old-fashioned way - in analog on S-VHS or VHS. Al Griffin said that watching digital tapes he'd made on the HS-HD2000U "was one of the best high-def experiences I've had."

There aren't many receivers that can achieve the ease of integration and operation you're looking for with this complex of a system. Kenwood's VR-5900 ($3,000, reviewed in September 2001) is one of the exceptions. David Ranada said that the VR-5900 "literally bulges with concealed powers and abilities." But its 130-watt-per-channel output and THX Ultra certification mean that it's also up to the sonic challenges posed by your various program sources: "Thanks to its low noise levels and large power reserves, [the VR-5900] never sounded strained even when the music was going full tilt in all channels."