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If you can, try to imagine a football having sexual relations with a hard-boiled egg. Their offspring might be a Rolly — making its Sony CES debut this year. Robotics meets boombox, Rolly is a playback device like none other. Its 2GB flash memory...

Trinnov is the name of the new auto setup and calibration system just added to the year-old Sherwood R-972 receiver ($1799). The SMPTE cinema standard is built into it. You can even transfer the SMPTE settings from receiver to USB to PC, log onto the SMPTE website, and analyze the settings. Sherwood also showed a surround-savvy stereo receiver, the RX-4203 ($199) with Dolby Virtual Speaker, Dolby Headphone, and an input that accepts a Bluetooth receiver, just in case you get the impulse to play music from your cell phone.

No really, he won't.

Dolby was showing us something we'd heard about at Cedia, but which they weren't quite ready to show last fall. This time, using video from three different programs, they did a before and after demo of how Dolby Volume equalizes disparities between sources. It worked well enough in the demo and one thing I did note was that it <i>wasn't</i> heavy handed. For example, the program that was clearly lower in volume in the "before" condition, was still softer than either of the other programs.