The International Ballroom in the Beverly Hilton has been the home to the Golden Globes for the past fifty years. The space is much smaller than it appears on TV. And much colder. Apparently someone heard it was going to be above 72 outside and turned the air conditioner up to cryonic.
Recently I sat down with Captain Jean-Luc Picard, in the guise of actor Patrick Stewart. He was out of uniform that morning because we were in a roundtable discussion about X-Men: The Last Stand.
Forget about DLP vs. LCoS or Blu-ray vs. HD DVD. The biggest battle heating up in the home-entertainment world right now is over who's going to rule the next generation of gaming. And Microsoft just launched the first strike - 100 megatons worth of silicon known as Xbox 360.
Tony Hawk became the world's most famous skateboarder by "going big" and performing maneuvers no one else had even thought of. But when it came to his new home, the avowed "electronics nut" decided that less is more. Hawk in front of his home theater system.
When José, the Fed Ex guy, rings my doorbell, the transaction is well scripted. He gives me the box containing the Next Thing to Review, and I give him the box containing the Last Thing I Reviewed. One glance at the Next Thing box tells me which link in the audio/video chain I'll be scrutinizing for the next few weeks. Like I said, it's highly choreographed.
Most people never see hard-disk drives, but their impact on our lives is becoming universal. We take them for granted, remembering how essential they are only when they occasionally fail. While CDs pretty much own the data of the audio world, hard-disk drives are providing exciting new possibilities. Take Yamaha's CDR-HD1300, for example.
Photos by Tony Cordoza Take a good look at the Yamaha MusicCAST system: it just might be a glimpse into the future of home audio entertainment. The MCX-1000 server (above), essentially a CD recorder on steroids crossed with a digital music server, provides two main improvements over traditional playback devices.
Furniture Why banish your components to a dark, stuffy closet? Furniture makers have a variety of stands and cabinets that will make your gear easy to get to and great to look at.
Back in October 2004, we tested the ZVOX audio system, an all-in-one "virtual" surround option for those who want something better than built-in TV speakers. Now comes the $199 ZVOX mini audio system, a shrunk-down, portable version intended to provide sound for music players like the iPod or for TVs.
What can you get from a single box not much larger than a DVD player with three small drivers firing forward and a woofer port firing rearward? If the box is the Zvox 315 Sound Console, you get more sound than you might think - full, wide stereo and a surprising amount of surround sound.