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Tyll Hertsens, editor of our sibling site InnerFidelity.com, talks about his recently posted "Celebrity Headphone Deathmatch," in which he evaluates some 15 celebrity-endorsed headphones, finding some to be superb and others, well, not so much. Tyll also discusses how the headphone market has changed over the last 10 years, including the surprising trend toward higher prices as everything else in consumer electronics gets cheaper. Plus, answers to chat room questions and more.

Run Time: 1:00:53

Last weekend, I had the honor and privilege—not to mention the great pleasure—of guest hosting Leo Laporte's nationally syndicated radio show, The Tech Guy, while Leo was attending a conference called Le Web in Paris, France, and hobnobbing with the likes of French president Nicolas Sarkozy. I answered call-in questions about home theater for three hours on Saturday and again on Sunday for a listening audience of around a million! I also had a couple of very interesting guests on the show, including Oscar- and Emmy-winning composer Michael Giacchino, whose credits include Lost, Alias, Up, Star Trek, and Super 8 among many others, and film-restoration expert Grover Crisp, who's currently working on Lawrence of Arabia for theatrical and Blu-ray release.

Not only that, I answered more questions from the chat room during the commercial and news breaks, and it was all captured on high-quality video by the incredibly talented crew of TWiT, Leo's podcast network. The video of both days is available right here, so please enjoy this double dose of home theater geeky goodness!

With so many products among our reviews that merit Top Picks status, I'd like to share with you my personal favorites from 2011. Of course, all of our Top Picks are worthy of your serious consideration, but these are the ones I'd buy if I was shopping for home-theater products in the entry-level, midrange, and high-end price ranges.

We often get letters at Home Theater asking about our lab tests for audio products and why we perform them. In the simplist terms, our lab trials serve two key functions. The first is to warn you, the consumer, about any false or misleading claims that manufacturers might make about the performance of their products. The second is to add objective insights to the reviewer’s subjective observations about the sound of a product, and most important, create verifiable criteria on which to compare similar products. Our goal is to provide the most pertinent audio technical information and present the data in a consistent manner over time that allows for easy comparison, even over a wide range of model sizes and prices and over the span of many years. Here’s how we condense a day’s worth of measurement data into a few salient points in what we call the Audio Measurement Box.