At CES, legendary audio company McIntosh introduced a special 50th Anniversary Limited Edition McIntosh MC275 tube power amplifier. According to McIntosh, the 75-watt x 2 MC275 was designed and engineered in 1961 by McIntosh co-founder Sidney Corderman and the McIntosh Engineering Team, and it's been an object of desire for McIntosh aficionados ever since. Adding to the excitement of the introduction, McIntosh handed out what has to be one of the best press kit flash drives in the history of CES: a miniature version of the MC275 with 4 GB of flash memory hidden inside one of the output transformers. McIntosh says they are only building 275 of the 50th Anniversary Limited Edition MC275 (hmmm, I wonder where they came up with that number?), so it's destined to be a highly sought after piece of gear. I'm not sure how many mini-MC275 flash drives McIntosh has to give out, but I know it's going to be quite a collector's item, too. Now, if I could just figure out where to connect the speaker wires...
Where was home theater at the 2012 CES? Mostly swamped in a sea of disinterest. Maybe consumers got tired of adding more channels. Maybe they got tired of complexity. Or maybe they’re just broke! For whatever reason, the focus at CES 2012 was on simpler systems that minimize complexity without (we hope) minimizing sound quality.
To offer an alternative to cable, Boxee offers hundreds of channels of online content, a web browser and now live TV. Better than connecting an antenna directly to your TV where you simply surf through channels, connect an HD antenna to the Boxee Live TV USB dongle and browse cover art for TV shows on broadcast TV channels you receive.
Boxee believes that by adding live TV, more people will be able to “cut the cord,” that is quit their cable service. Premium content from Netflix and a variety of other online streaming sources along with your local ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox channels are combined in the Boxee experience.
Until now, DLNA certifications were used for personal content--movies, music, and photos--stored in media libraries in your home network.
This is a revolutionary advance because manufacturers have been searching for a way to make movie and TV studios comfortable with sharing premium content in a way that cannot be pirated. Premium Video certified products will communicate digital rights management information for each movie or TV show and allow the streaming to take place but will not allow recording. In fact, devices that can record--NAS drives, computers--will probably not be Premium Video certified.