Clearly embedded somewhere in America's national psyche is an obsession with getting thin. How else do you explain both the celebrity of Nicole Richie and the craze for flat-panel TVs? In fact, with the increased focus on TVs slim enough to be mounted on a wall, the environment for rear-projection HDTVs has gotten a lot tougher.
Do you need 1080p in a 42-inch flat panel? This is an important question, especially for plasma manufacturers that fear losing customers to the LCD camp at this highly coveted screen size. Up until now, plasma technology's cell structure has made it difficult to fit 1,920 by 1,080 pixels into a 42-inch screen size, which seems to have put them at a competitive disadvantage. As I write this, the first true 1080p 42-inch plasma (a Panasonic) is about to hit the shelves at a price of $2,500, but the market is already littered with 42-inch 1080p LCDs priced under $2,000. If consumers believe that they must have 1080p right now, it's fairly obvious which route they'll go.
What would your life be like if you'd married the first person you ever dated? If you want a great home theater system, sometimes it pays to dig deeper. OK, American Acoustic Development (AAD) stands in the shadow of larger and more prestigious brands, so this may be the first time AAD's M Series speakers have come to your attention. And you're not likely to find the Rotel RSX-1057 receiver in the big chain stores that fill cavernous spaces with little worth hearing. But these two brands have more to offer than many of their market-leading, deep-pocketed rivals.
Monitor Audio has the metal thing down. I remember thinking that after my first encounter with a pair of Monitor Studio speakers in the mid-1980s. In those days, metal drivers had a reputation for adding an annoying metallic zing to the sound, but the Monitors were as sweet as could be. Over the years, Monitor continued to hone the technology; even now, when there are a lot of great-sounding speakers with metal drivers, to my ear, nobody does it better. Monitor's current product range includes a healthy selection of custom-install models and the heavy-metal contenders, which run from the entry-level Bronze, the Silver, the Gold, and up to the flagship Platinum speaker lines.
I'm not exactly sure what a sugarplum is—probably a Christmas treat in Victorian England. But I do know that for those of us in the AV game, it comes early every year. September is time for the CEDIA Expo, to be held this year in Denver.
Hey, everybody. As I write this, I'm getting ready to go on vacation with my next gadget, an HD camcorder that I'll tell you all about in October. Until then, I wanted to use this month's space to update you on the next step in my home theater plans.
