Fred Manteghian

Price: $1,595 At A Glance: CD quality, or better, in an easy-to-use iTunes wrapper • iPhone or iPod touch remote control not included

From Air to iTunity

I used to say, “Disk is cheap,” even back in the ’80s when, let’s be honest, it really wasn’t. A 40-megabyte disk drive—go ask your dad what a megabyte is—went for $400 and was about enough to store a 4-minute CD track. Today, I have a pair of 250-gigabyte external drives that ran me half that amount even a few years ago. Together with my laptop, I’ve got a system that easily fulfills my every iTunes fantasy—except one. I still have to rely on an iPod and iPod docking station to get music from the computer rig to my main system across the room. If that’s been bugging you too, check out the Micromega AirStream WM-10. It’s an 802.11n wireless router that your iTunes library can connect to, all for a price that—well, there’s the rub. This thing ain’t cheap.

Xperiment, a maker of music and movie whole house systems for custom installers has some interesting, albeit expensive products. But expensive as they are, they really do do a lot and compared to some of their competitors, they're sort of midline in price. Xperiment just struck a deal with Music Giants to download music and movies into one of their high end servers. Their servers, Poseidon and Polaris, offer between 1.5 and 4.0 Terabytes of raided storage for prices that closely mirror what corporation pay to protect their data. Of course, I don't know if you need that much protection for, say, <i>Godfather III</i>, but it's nice to know it's there. A top end server, the Poseidon, is $25,000 and each room where you want control needs a "client" which features a DVD player/reader (from $2,400 to $3,000). Everything is connected with Ethernet and the whole system can even synch with your other system at your vacation home in the Hamptons while jet over there for the weekend.

Cool new device to hang your plasma. Four of these slip in, pop-up modern versions of a molly bolt will hold a 150 lbs of high definition plasma heaven. Cost is only $16 a pair, but they'll only sell to your dealer. So with labor, permits, taxes, that comes to /. . .

Okay, maybe I was a little harsh before (or below, remember, time runs backward in blogs). Here's the perfectly readable placard for the Sony STR-DA6400ES