Premiere Design

Last year, I profiled the incredible Fenice speaker from Sonus Faber—a model that is now called "the Sonus Faber" due to a legal dispute over the name. Despite this name change, the company is applying what it has learned from that no-holds-barred flagship to other, more affordable models, such as the Amati Futura.

As I've written many times, the Ultimate Gear blog is intended to cover A/V products that embody extreme performance, design, and/or price. The 2010 ES line of A/V receivers from Sony—which were unveiled last week at a press event in Beverly Hills, California—might not fit any of these criteria, but they include so many unique and highly useful features that I decided I could legitimately cover them here.

OK, you can stop drooling now. We know you can’t wait to get your hands on the world’s first TV capable of displaying 8 million pixels of luscious detail—four times the resolution of 1080p. (We can’t, either.) Sony’s 84-inch XBR-84X900 4K LCD HDTV is one of the first 4K TVs to reach a handful of stores across the country. The heart of the set is a new chip that analyzes images with resolutions of 1080p or lower and upscales them to 4K. How well the chip performs that task is vitally important since 4K content for home viewing is not likely to be available for some time, even though Sony says 10,000 U.S. movie theaters are already using 4K projectors, and a growing number of theatrical movies are being shot in 4K.

Most home-theater geeks prefer to buy separate components in order to optimize the performance of each one and allow them to be swapped out independently for repair or upgrade. But what if you don't have enough space to accommodate all those separate devices? <A href="http://www.usa.denon.com">Denon</A>'s answer is the new S-5BD, which combines a full-featured Blu-ray player and AVR into one compact package.

Live music is quite different from the visual arts. For example, every time a musician plays a given song, it is unique, with inevitable variations from one performance to the next. As Joni Mitchell once noted, no one ever asked Van Gogh to paint <I>The Starry Night</I> again. But many musicians are expected to play certain songs at every concert, and these songs sound different every time. On the other hand, recorded music is more like a painting&#151;once it's in the can, it sounds exactly the same every time it's played.

In a joint venture between US-based Seymour AV and UK-based Screen Excellence, the aptly named Seymour-Screen Excellence (SSE) recently announced its new Reference Fixed Frame (RF) acoustically transparent projection screens. Initially available are two materials—Enlightor 2 and Enlightor 4K.

The Steinway Lyngdorf LS Concert speaker is distinguished not only for its towering stature and exquisite looks but for its technical design, which combines the virtues of line-source and dipole speaker design.