CES 2015

Dan D'Agostino returns to the monster power amp business.

In typical Dish grandstand fashion, the company reeled off a slew of announcements about an upcoming 4K set top box, the launch of Sling Television stand-alone streaming service, newly designed hopper menus and remote control, and whole home audio.

With more and more music and video being stored by consumers on external hard-disks, those disks have themselves become valuable commodities. You’d think someone who took time to rip an entire CD and/or DVD collection, or downloaded a boatload of high-res albums from HDtracks, would make the additional step to secure their data by backing it up. But in many situations that isn’t the case.

We don’t cover turntables much here at S&V, but an interesting new line of upmarket turntables from European manufacturer E.A.T. is being distributed in the U.S. by VANA Ltd.

Shown here is the middle child of the three E.A.T. tables VANA brought to the show...

While Emotiva's powered speakers and pre-pro aren't new, they did combine to provide one of the few surround demos at the Venetian.

A new Firefox-based streaming dongle called Matchstick takes on Chromecast with new features. But there's a catch: It's not yet available for sale.