Strictly speaking, we should be telling you more about NAD's first Blu-ray player, and you've already heard about its a/v receivers, but the Viso Two HTiB got our attention with stylish looks. It's a DVD (and DVD-Audio) player with built-in 50-watt stereo amp and Dolby Virtual Speaker (and Dolby Headphone). Price is $1299 if you want something really cool looking to play your old DVD library in the bedroom. But what's that underneath?
Why, it's NAD's first speaker line, the Viso Thirty bookshelf and center channel models. They've got titanium tweeters, four-inch polypropylene woofers, and a $699 pricetag (we need to clarify if that's per speaker).
Focal of France showed their new 814V 2 1⁄2-way bass reflex tower speaker with one 6 1⁄2" woofer, a 6 1⁄2" mid-bass driver and a 1" inverted dome tweeter. The gloss black finish on the 814V is designed to complement a flat panel television with a gloss black bezel. The 814V is available now with a suggested retail price of $1795/pair.
Pioneer didn't have a big press push at the show this year, but they are pushing three new Blu-ray players with BD-Live.
The Pioneer BDP-120 and BDP-320 and the Elite BDP-23FD are all BD-Live with either expandable external memory or built-in...
Toshiba's showing off a complete line of LCD/DVD combo units. Toshiba's still betting that DVD is going to be around for quite a while -- not a single Blu-ray player in their CES booth . . . this year.
Toshiba believes...
The President-Elect's transition team today announced that the conversion to digital TV, scheduled to occur on February 17, should be moved back. John Podestra chair of the transition team, sent a letter to the Commerce Committees of the House...
JVC introduced the company's first Blu-ray-equipped home theater in a box system. The TH-SB100 is a 2.0 system, with a Profile 2.0 player, powered soundbar and wireless subwoofer. The player provides BD-Live capability, and an Ethernet port....
You may not have heard of Analog Devices, Inc. because the company makes integrated circuits and other components, not consumer products. But ADI is big into video. I saw a demo of a video-transmission system based on JPEG2000, the same compression technology used in digital cinema. Dubbed HDAnywhere, the system can be used to send video over any wired or wireless medium very efficiently. The demo included two TVs displaying the same content—one was receiving conventional HDMI over fiber-optic cable while the other got its signal wirelessly using UWB (ultra wideband) over a distance of 50 feet. There was a slight delay in the wireless image, but they were nearly identical otherwise. Hitachi is shipping a TV with an outboard input/processor box that uses HDAnywhere via UWB, which I'll take a close look at when I get over the Hitachi booth.
Italian SIM2 is another company known for ultra-high-end projectors, including the new and improved flagship HT5000E introduced at CES with three DarkChip 4 DMDs. If you have to ask how much, you can't afford it, but I'll tell you anyway—$66,000 for the projector with your choice of 16:9 lens. If you want the ISCO 3 anamorphic lens and sled, that'll be another $15,500. The projector looked spectacular on a 116" Da-Lite Affinity screen. The single-chip Domino D60 (pictured) is more down to earth at $5000, and adding a Panamorph anamorphic lens and sled with mounting bracket brings the total cost to $9000.
Unlike WirelessHD, which I wrote about yesterday, Amimon's WHDI (Wireless HD Interface) is now included in several TVs, but they are only available in Japan. Sony's Bravia Wireless Link module and Belkin's FlyWire also use WHDI and are available in the US. WHDI uses the 5GHz band to transmit up to 1080p/60 with second-generation chips over a distance of up to 30 meters through walls with a latency of less than 1ms. Amimon's hotel suite has 10 streams going at once across three rooms in addition to WiFi in the same 5GHz band with impressive results. Pictured are two WHDI receiver modules—a major reduction is size from the suitcase-sized box I saw a couple of years ago. Members of the WHDI Consortium include LG, Sharp, Sony, Hitachi, and Samsung.