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The room-correction band-wagon is already rolling across the home theater plain, and it's rapidly gaining momentum with each new batch of model releases. Several products, from the highest-end pre/pros to the lowest-end receivers, are touting room assistance these days. This is hardly surprising—in fact, the more-surprising part is that it's taken this long for the broader run of electronics manufacturers to embrace the idea. After all, room interaction will always be the single most important factor, by far, in making an audio system sound right in its particular listening environment. Naturally, it's in the manufacturer's best interest to provide as much help as possible. Fair or not, the vast majority of users are going to blame the product, not the room, when they hook up their system and it doesn't sound good. Considering the challenges that the vast majority of users' listening environments are going to present, it's easy to see why even a little correction could go a long way.

As the transition from analog to digital TV chugs along, there have been some significant advances in the design and performance of set-top receivers. The earliest models, from 1997 to 1998, including RCA's DTC-100 and Panasonic's TU-DST50W, were fairly large, heavy boxes painted an imposing dark gray that had a limited amount of functionality and weren't all that sensitive to terrestrial 8VSB digital TV broadcasts.

TacT is a company with a mission. Their amps are all digital, and their 2-channel and AV preamplifier-processors are dedicated to solving the single biggest puzzle in home audio reproduction: the effect of the room.

Of all the subwoofers I've reviewed over the years, the one I remember as being the most satisfying overall is the Bag End Infrasub-18. It went lower than any sub I've had in my system, and its integration with the main speakers was the most natural. At any level that I could tolerate, the low bass had an authority that left other subwoofers sounding just a bit strained.