Tom Norton

Mark Fleischmann raved about the input jack panel to his hotel TV in an earlier post. Here at the Hyatt Place we have even more flexibility, including component, HDMI, and a myriad of other connections. And the TVs in the rooms are 42" LG plasmas! If I had only had brought along something to plug into them, like a Blu-ray player!! And this hotel is cheaper than the Mirage, with parking right outside the door and no noisy casino to traipse through from car to room. In exchange, all we have to put up with is being under the takeoff leg at McCarran airport 18 hours a day. Actually, we're under it 24 hours a day. The hotel doesn't move for those other six hours; there are no flights from midnight to 6AM.

NAD has added an advanced Sigma Designs VXP image processor to its two preamp processors, the M15 HD (at $4499, a major update from the previous M15 Masters' Series), the T175 HD Preamp-Tuner-Processor ($2999), and the T785 flagship AV receiver ($3999f-shown). In addition, these products will now fully decode Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD Master Audio from bitstream.

At $3000, the new T785 is a new high in price for an NAD AV receiver. But it's loaded with features, including 7x120 conservatively rated watts, 4 HDMI 1.3 inputs, the Audyssey MultiEQ XT room correction system, and multichannel audio (PCM) over HDMI (but no on-board decoding for Dolby TrueHD or DTS HD Master Audio.

Wolf Cinema is a new company with a lineup of high-end, 3-chip DLP projectors. The three models (DCX-500, DCX-1000, and DCX-1500—the numbers indicate the lamp wattage) all use Xenon lamps, and the projectors are available either in a black-box, custom form designed to be hidden away, or in a finished case. But you won't find Wolf products (marketed by Sumiko) in your local AV shop; they deal in custom system packages only.