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Like some 40 million other people, I love my iPhone. It’s always with me, serving as everything from trail-finder to stock ticker to guitar tuner to, occasionally, mobile phone. While fumbling in the dark with the minimum three or four remote controls that my ever-shifting A/V system requires just to watch a movie, I’ve often wondered if there was “an app for that.”

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At A Glance: Elegant touch-sensitive screen • Decodes multiple audio formats • Internet radio support • Integrates with Facebook and Flickr

Remember the days when you stacked hundreds, if not thousands, of CDs into towers or bookshelves so you could have your entire music collection at your fingertips? The CD player evolved from a single tray to a multi-disc changer that allowed up to 400 discs per unit, but you still had to find a place for all of those pesky cases. In 1999, the music world turned upside down when 18-year-old Shawn Fanning created Napster, and a new way of music delivery was born. Millions of people around the world digitized their music into MP3s, which compromised quality in favor of convenience. Fortunately, as computing power increased and storage became cheaper, audiophiles could store their digital music in a lossless format (FLAC, WMA Lossless, Apple Lossless, etc.) in order to preserve the integrity of the original recording. But with all of this music digitized, how do you listen to it in your home theater?

Broaden Your Horizons

If you’ve investigated the subject of constant-height projection, you know that it can be a complicated, slightly intimidating business. We covered the ground rather thoroughly in “Beating the Black Bars” (HT, October 2008). Constant-height display generally involves placing a so-called anamorphic lens in front of a projector’s native lens when viewing true widescreen films—that is, films with an aspect ratio of around 2.35:1 (often called scope films). Such a setup also employs a 2.35:1 screen. For material with an aspect ratio of 1.85:1 or less, the lens is normally moved out of the way and the image is projected onto the 2.35:1 screen with black bars on each side. This is sometimes called windowboxing.