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Price: $2,699 At A Glance: Gets the black bars out • Solid value • Minor uniformity issues

Elite Screens may be less well known than some of the bigger names in the business, but they offer a wide range of projection screens for every application. Since their products are manufactured in China, they’re more than competitive in price. But this limits their ability to offer customization, such as sizes not included in their standard lineup.

Adam Audio is a virtual unknown in the home theater world, but their monitors grace a good many recording studios across the land. The company came to CEDIA with their new GTC (Grand Theatre Components) speaker line, which features an unusual modular construction. Look closely at the picture and you'll see that the driver pods are modular and on their own screw-down plates. This allows the mid/tweeter cluster to be reoriented for L/R or center channel duties, insuring that the proprietary Heil-style ART (Accelerating Ribbon Technology) planar tweeter is always optimal for the application. The design also allows the plate to be physically moved from the top of the speaker to the center location for center channel use. Likewise, in situations where the speakers are mounted into a faux wall (as they are here) or behind wall fabric, the mid/tweeter can be repositioned to better ensure ear-level placement. The three models are all ported cabinet designs but only the top two, the GTC77 and GTC88 (just a bigger versioin of the 77) feature the modular construction. All three cabinets average about a foot deep. The GTC77, with an X-ART tweeter, 4-inch midwoofer and two 7-inch subwoofers is expected to start shipping soon at around $1,500 to $2,000 retail.

NAD was at the show with a slew of new products, among them a revamped 4-model AV receiver line: the T 748 (100 watts x 7, $900), T 757 (120w x 7, $1,600), T 777 (140w x 7, $3,000), and the flagship T 787 (shown here, 200w x 7, $4,000). The big news for enthusiasts is that NAD's future-proof MDC design has moved down in the line and now begins with T 757, the lowest price yet for an MDC receiver. MDC stands for Modular Design Construction and allows the unit's input/output circuitry to be user-updated as needed over time to swap in new HDMI versions or introduce new flexibility. Portions of the receiver's jack-pack are on slide-in/screw down modules that can be changed from the rear panel. Home Theater's review of the T 757 is coming soon.