As I've written many times, the Ultimate Gear blog is intended to cover A/V products that embody extreme performance, design, and/or price. The 2010 ES line of A/V receivers from Sony—which were unveiled last week at a press event in Beverly Hills, California—might not fit any of these criteria, but they include so many unique and highly useful features that I decided I could legitimately cover them here.

Traffic on the San Diego Freeway and surrounding surface streets was among the worst I've seen in many years as Tom Norton and I slowly made our way to Sony's big 3D launch event yesterday at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, California. We finally got past the accident—after a medevac helicopter landed right next to us on the freeway—and arrived shortly before Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer said, "Thanks for coming!"

Sony's press conference was awash in new products, such as the BDP-CX7000ES 400-disc changer, which can accommodate Blu-rays, DVDs, and CDs. This Profile 2.0 player connects to the Internet in order to access BD-Live content, update the firmware, and download Gracenote MusicID and VideoID data related to the discs it holds, making it easy to find what you want. The retail price is $1900, and it's available now.

High-end Blu-ray players made quite a showing at CEDIA, including the BDP-S5000ES from Sony, shown here from the front and back. It's BD-Live, and it even comes with a 1GB USB memory module to enable that functionality. The player decodes all the advanced audio codecs and offers a 7.1-channel analog output. It should start shipping in November for around $2000.