Fred Manteghian

Sure they look a little too “take me to your leader” for some folks, but maybe that's appropriate, because the sound from the Micropod SE speakers from <a href=" http://www.scandyna-speakers.com/" target="new">scandyna</a> is out of this world. These two-way speakers perch fairly discretely on my office credenza, doing something the 25 year-old JVC SW/AM/FM radio and a Grundig portable were never able to do – bring fine tunes (or is that iTunes?) into my office. Of course, you'll need a way to hook your iPod to the speakers and for this scandyna provides "the dock," as they state in their capital-letter-averse terminology.

Jon Banner took this wonderful picture with my Panasonic Lumix TZ3 camera. Those are Ultimateavmag's Product of the Year Awards lined up on the table in the SourceInterlink suite at the Venetian. Outside the window is a long view of Las Vegas.

I counted almost twenty questions in the one hour ask the editors session on HDTV. That's Geoff, Tom and Shane up there looking like Sadam's jury. The questions dealt with high definition TV, as expected, and overflowed to the high def format war, also unavoidable. Attempts to close us down before our full hour was up were, shall we say, unsuccessful.

If you look real close, you can see Capt. James T. Kirk sitting in his command chair. The <a href="http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2131034" target="new">Radio Shack Indoor VHF/UHF/HDTV Antenna with RF Remote Control</a> may not be able to pick up intergalactic transmissions, but it does a decent, if somewhat mixed job, with HDTV signals. In one case, it reached out over twenty miles to pull in a full-time digital <a href="http://www.stationindex.com/tv/callsign/WSAH" Target="new">"multi-cultural shopping"</a> station (so now you can not only buy things you don't need, you can buy them in languages you don't understand). But what wasn't so impressive was its inability to pull in the closest tower, a mere 8 miles away, in anything but analog (and miserable looking analog at that!).