LATEST ADDITIONS

Phil Jones of American Acoustic Development told us about some of his new speaker lines. The 3000 Series, including the 3003 floorstander ($3900/pair), uses a silver tweeter and ring (as opposed to cone) woofer. Why is the baffle so wide? More forward energy, said Phil. The more modestly priced Vi Series including the Vi410 ($550/pair) has a soft dome tweeter and carbon fiber woofer.

We've been waiting for Escient, one of the major names in the music-server market, to offer a true video-server solution. At CEDIA, the company showed off its new Vision Series line of video playback and distribution products, but there was no way to directly import movies from the disc drive to the hard drive. Happily, that issue has now been addressed. Escient is releasing two true video servers/players: The VS-100 sports dual 500GB drivers, and the VS-200 has dual 1TB drives. Then there's big papa, the VX-600 media server, which has four 1TB hard drives. The line also includes the VC-1 networked client, to which you can stream movies, photos, and music stored on the servers over a home network. The Vision Series allows access to the Rhapsody online music service, and the players all have HDMI 1.3 connections and 1080p upconversion. The products certainly aren't cheap -- $3,999 for the VS-100, $5,999 for the VS-200, $7,999 for the VX-600, and $1,999 for the VC-1 -- but they're not as bank-breaking as other video servers on the market. Look for the Vision Series in February.

Marantz is joining the Blu crew in 2008 as well, with a high-end Blu-ray Disc player, the BD8002. And actually, high-end doesn't even cut it. Marantz is calling this player "ultimate quality" with built-in Silicon Optix processing for superb DVD upconversion, and the press materials indicate internal decoding of both Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio.

The state of mobile digital television is roughly where HDTV was more than a decade ago: Electronics manufacturers, broadcasters, and telecommunications giants are battling to be on the winning side of a unified standard. Among the contenders...