OTHER TECH

Despite all the huffing and puffing over copy protection, making your own audio and video recordings is easier than ever. And for audio in particular, recording quality is also better than ever. The tough part is sorting through all the alternatives - a task we'll strive to simplify here.

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.

You'll find no better overview of home entertainment than in the following pages, where we present the winners of Sound & Vision's 2001 Reviewer's Choice Awards.

The concept of "plug and play" is a starry-eyed consumer-electronics fantasy. In my experience, almost all home entertainment devices - at least the kinds covered in this magazine - need some sort of setup to achieve optimum performance. Heck, even my first childhood record player had to have the volume adjusted.

Audio buffs have been known to lock horns over all kinds of things - CDs vs. vinyl, Dolby Digital vs. DTS, tubes vs. solid-state, DVD-Audio vs. Super Audio CD, and on and on. But one of the hottest debates of recent years has been over which kind of speakers work best for the rearward surround channels in a multichannel setup: monopole (a.k.a. direct-radiating) or dipole?