SAY WATT Canton's CD 3200 is textbook modern speaker design: a slim aluminum cabinet, sexy styling, and ... an amplifier? Well, that's different. Once you've plugged this tower in, it'll deliver a nominal 200 watts to, uh, itself.
CONTACT The Harmony 1000 controller is so sexy, the instant you see it, you'll wanna touch it. That's encouraged, of course, since its 3.5-inch screen is a touchpanel, sporting the simple activity-based menus that are Harmony's claim to fame.
A NEW LIGHT So you think you know the big benefit of NuVision's 52LEDLP TV just from the name, do you? Well, yeah, having an LED "illuminator" instead of a regular lamp will get you better contrast, but did you know you also get a much longer life, full brightness as soon as you turn it on, and less power consumption?
Accell's UltraAV HDMI 2-1 Switch The good thing about HDMI is that it reduces the wire tangle in an A/V system by carrying digital high-def video and multichannel audio signals on a single cable. The bad thing is that many HDTVs sold over the past few years have only one HDMI input.
Q. I watched a special on Discovery Channel called "Home Theater Revolution," and the theater expert built a room for a family to watch movies. He put the surround speakers on the back wall, as opposed to on the side walls facing in.
Sony's long-awaited BDP-S1 Blu-ray player has finally hit the shelves. It does 1080 lines at 24 frame per second for the ultimate in filmlikeness. And it's not just a product--it's a punctuation mark, adding "an exclamation point to Sony’s full HD 1080 line of products, which ranges from BRAVIA™ flat-panel LCD and Grand WEGA SXRD® rear-projection televisions to the new PlayStation® 3 game console, Blu-ray Disc enabled VAIO computers, PC drives and recordable BD media," says the press release. Speaking of Sony HDTVs, did you catch the secret sale from November 24-27? Too bad, so sad. The BDP-S1 sells for $1000, not bad by early-adopter standards, but if you can wait till 2008, the cost of a Blu-ray drive will drop 50 percent, according to DigiTimes. Of course, just because a major component drops in price, that doesn't necessarily mean that a product will do the same--but given the fact that a BD drive is the major component of a BD player, we might entertain hopes.