HT Staff

Is your enthusiasm for home theater bigger than your available space? Love great sound but hate stacks of amplifiers? Check out Mordaunt-Short's new Declaration Series System 500 THX select home theater speaker system. The legendary British loudspeaker maker has recently returned to the US with several high-performance lines.

Play compressed audio files on your DVD player.

Not content merely to conquer the world, the DVD player is rapidly becoming the Swiss army knife of consumer electronics. The list of formats it supports is already swollen: DVD-Video, Dolby Digital, Dolby Surround, DTS, the videoCD format that's so popular in Asia, and (of course) the CD, not to mention CD-Rs and CD-RWs. Gourmet formats like DVD-Audio, SACD, and even the obscure 24/96 stereo Digital Audio Disc are finding their way into affordable DVD players, as is a decidedly nongourmet format: MP3 compressed audio is coming to a DVD player near you.

HE2006 will feature concerts galore—everything from live classical music to jazz to electronica.

The surround processor is the heart of every high-end home theater system. Good ones, like Myryad Systems' MDP500, have flexibility built in for unanticipated new formats.