Always looking for new ways to make good on their promise to let users stream all the music on earth in any room, Sonos today announces a new player - the Play:3 - and a new naming scheme for their product line.
Green Design Prefer your TV not in view when not in use? Green Design's Series 2 media armoire can keep it out of sight, but the beautifully finished solid cherrywood cabinet may catch your eye anyway. The top part can hold most 36-inch direct-view TVs, and the lower shelves are adjustable for the height of your gear.
Whatever your personal-portable pleasure, you can hide it away with the latest in Father's Day fashions (clockwise from above): ScotteVest's Hidden Cargo Pants ($80) have 11 pockets to help you mobilize with ease. They're 100% cotton and designed for everyday use.
KALEID-O-SET In the modern TV world of huge screens and off-the-scale resolution, color matters more than ever. The palette in Mitsubishi's 57-inch 1080p set is run by a 6-Primary Color System, which creates the "subtractive" colors (cyan, magenta, and yellow) directly instead of mixing red, green, and blue.
Samsung Joining forces, Samsung, DirecTV, and TiVo have created the SIR-S4120R video hard-disk recorder. Not only does it have a supersized 120-gigabyte (GB) hard drive that can hold up to 100 hours of shows but also dual DirecTV satellite tuners so you can record two shows at once or watch one while recording another.
TERABYTE POWER Unless you're Sony BMG, you'll never run out of room for your music in the AudioReQuest S4.2500. Its massive 1.5-terabyte hard disk can hold 2,500 CDs worth of music - and that's uncompressed. If you go the MP3 route, there's enough room for 360,000 songs! Even the most dedicated Deadhead could fit his collection on that.
FLAT CAT Other subwoofers may laugh at the SC-IW's unconventional design, but installers will love it, since the slim sub (3.4 inches thick) is made to fit perfectly inside a 2 x 4-foot studded wall. The driver module (that's the small part) can fire up or down, with a scoop aiming the bass into the room.
Most new Blu-ray players are capable of streaming both movies and music, so why would you ever consider buying a dedicated music-streaming device? I mean, if you learned nothing else from your mother, you’re probably at least squared away on the concept of not buying the cow if you’re already getting the milk for free.
Good size, good price - what more could you ask for in a TV? Okay, yeah, high-definition would be nice, and Vizio's 37-inch L37 LCD set ($1,500) has that covered, too, sporting a screen with 1,366 x 768-pixel resolution.
MEDIUM MEDIA Fans of portable video face a stark choice: squinting at microscopic cellphone and iPod screens or lugging around a bulky laptop. Staking out the middle ground is the Pepper Pad 3, which sports a roomy 7-inch touchscreen and a 20-GB hard drive.
Samsung’s product preview event, held on Wednesday 3/20 at NYC’s American Museum of Finance (who knew such a place existed?) was notable on two counts. First, the company announced a price for its 85-inch UN85S9 Ultra HD TV — the cover star of Sound&Vision’s April/May print issue. Second, it had another cover star, SI swimsuit model Kate Upton (fully clothed), along with Giants’ quarterback Eli Manning on hand to say how much they dig the company’s 2013 Smart Hub interface.
($299) No, it's not called iTV, but that little white box down there does allow you to play all of your iTunes content from your PC or Mac wirelessly on your widescreen TV. The 40-GB hard drive can store up to 50 hours of video, 9,000 songs, or 25,000 photos, or a combination. Apple TV is capable of delivering high-definition images at 720p.
There are plenty of wireless streaming options out there these days, but looking at the latest wave of offerings from Yamaha and Denon, it seems that Apple's AirPlay protocol is the one that looms largest in the minds of major manufacturers.
For the past few years, the trend in speaker design has been to make models that blend into the environment - from super-flat on-wall speakers to paintable in-walls that disappear entirely. But the Energy RC-Mini speakers ($200 to $250 each) scream that loudspeakers can be beautiful!