Mark Fleischmann

With the TGM-100 Theater Grand Media Server, Sunfire has added a signal source to its excellent speaker and amp products, so now you can have a complete Sunfire system. The server sucks up DVDs and CDs and stores the content on the TGM-HD6 Theater Grand Hard Drive. Note that the latter, on the bottom, has eight slots. Available drives hold one, three, or six terabytes. Sunfire will explore the Blu-ray angle "when it makes sense."

Everyone's favorite Finnish loudspeaker company showed the 5041a in-wall sub. It's got two 6.5-inch drivers mated with the external RAM3 amp and will sell in the $3000-4000 range. In other Genelec models -- including the 12-inch monitor, 15-inch monitor, center, and on-wall models -- the amps formerly located on the back of the enclosures have been changed to in-rack amplification. Installers and customers spoke and Genelec listened.

I hate on-wall speakers because most of them sound awful. But James Loudspeaker defeated my expectations with the 64CSTOW ($4000/each). Their vertical slit enclosures are made of high-grade aircraft aluminum. There's no center speaker. Instead, the dual two-way design includes two drivers at top, which create a phantom center by summing to mono. The bottom two drivers handle the front left and right channels. Designer Mike Park said he decided to do on-walls because of demand in Europe, where it's inadvisable to poke holes in the walls of historic buildings. The demo featuring Chris Isaak was one of the sonic high points of the show. High-end consumers will want to demo these on-walls. Oh, and that thing in the picture? It's an in-ground sub -- imagine the terror.

Yup, that is a stack of four 15-inch subwoofers. Specifically, it's the Tannoy 15DS sub and it sells in the low four figures. The Tannoy demo also made use of the IW63 in-wall speaker. Invert the mount and it becomes, as it did here, an on-wall.