New Products

Okay, we’re still a couple days away from the official first day of spring but it’s warming up and the dreary winter landscape is starting to show signs of life. It’s a great time to celebrate the arrival springtime and have a look the latest A/V news and gear.

In her recent review of Denon’s Home Sound Bar 550 soundbar, Sound & Vision’s Leslie Shapiro commented that, while the bar had “good bass for its size…adding a wireless subwoofer would help.” Fortunately, help has just arrived in the form of Denon’s new Home subwoofer ($599), a Wi-Fi connected model featuring an 8-inch woofer housed in a sleek, compact enclosure that matches the Sound Bar 550’s design.

The latest soundbar to come from Britain’s Bowers & Wilkins is a gen-3 version of its Panorama model that adds Dolby Atmos processing plus upfiring drivers for a 3.1.2 configuration. The $999 bar is an all-in-one immersive audio solution that the company says will deliver “room-filling, powerful sound no one-box rival can match.”

As the pandemic winds down (again) and spring draws near, new product introductions are starting to pick up. Will they reach pre-2020 pandemic levels? Probably not, though the volume of press releases seems a bit higher than it was a year ago. Ongoing labor shortages and supply-chain disruptions caused by the logjam of shipping containers in major ports continue to hinder a return to normalcy — a situation that some analysts predict is here to stay for the rest of the year and possibly beyond. In the spirit of being thankful for the goods and services we can get, here’s a look at some of the latest A/V gear with a little news thrown into the mix.

Epson today announced the availability of a new three-chip LCD projector that combines improved pixel-shifting with a new multi-array laser design and refined video processing algorithms to deliver better 4K performance than previous models without sacrificing picture brightness.

It’s been a long time coming but turntable specialist Pro-Ject Audio Systems USA yesterday announced the availability of its first fully automatic turntable.