Audio Video News

Thursday at CEDIA is press day. The floor isn't open, but the day is usually filled with activities. This year things thinned out with the cancellation of several events, notably Toshiba. I suspect HD-DVD was going to be Toshiba's featured attraction, but
the word is out that this year's scheduled launch of HD-DVD has been put off until spring, where the battle will go toe-to-toe, or bit-to-bit, with Blu-ray.

Primedia's Home Technology Group has announced that the Home Entertainment Show 2006 will take place at the Sheraton Gateway Hilton in Los Angeles, CA on June 1-4, 2006. Previous successful events were held in Los Angeles in 1992, 1995, and 1998.

CEDIA Expo 2005 is nearly upon us, and with it comes a rash of new audio and video goodies. The annual trade-only event of the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association, held this year as most in Indianapolis, Indiana, has grown in a dozen years from a small education and demonstration event into an industry powerhouse second only to the immense January Consumer Electronics Show.

I hate it when members of my family blame me when anything goes wrong with our home theater system. As if I'm some sort of geeky gear guy, they heap abuse upon me if the DVD player hiccups because of the greasy, fingerprint-smeared disc they carelessly slid in it. No sound from the satellite receiver? No picture on the TV? The remote control isn't working? They call me. (And why does it always seem to inconveniently happen when I'm resting regally on my porcelain throne?)

More and more PC fanatics have grown to appreciate the computer as a television, fully exploiting the kick-ass video potential of even a run-of-the-mill PC monitor, first for viewing then for timeshifting/recording and even burning those recordings to DVD. The ATI TV Wonder Elite ($149) has it all covered. A surprisingly complicated chain of technology is necessary to achieve this amount of functionality at this level of quality, although it is all ultimately transparent to the end user, with a very user-friendly interface to boot. The TV Wonder Elite (TVWE) is also designed to work seamlessly with Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.

Multiroom audio is not a new idea. Nor are the concepts of digital amplification, touchscreen controllers, and audio distribution over CAT5 wiring. But not everyone has thought to bring all of those ideas together in one particular audio distribution product - and when a relative newcomer to the audio-in-any-room party shows up with an amplified (that's "amplified" as in "watts per channel") touchpanel in his hand, it's time to cock an eyebrow, act like you're not interested, and then try like heck to figure out exactly what's going on and how much it's going to cost.

At a press event in Pittsburgh, PA, last week, Sony announced two new rear-projection SXRD televisions. Previously available only in the company's upscale Qualia line, SXRD now enters a wider market. The 60-inch KDS-R60XBR1 and 50-inch KDS-R50XBR1 Grand Wega designs, at $5000 and $4000 respectively, are still priced toward the high-end, but they are now in direct competition with top-of-the-line sets using other digital display technologies.