New Products

For the past few years, the trend in speaker design has been to make models that blend into the environment - from super-flat on-wall speakers to paintable in-walls that disappear entirely. But the Energy RC-Mini speakers ($200 to $250 each) scream that loudspeakers can be beautiful!

With a sleek silver-gray finish, full-color LCD screen, and seductive curves, the Harmony 890 is ready for the centerfold of Remote Monthly. But it's not just another pretty wand - the 890 sends commands to your system via both infrared and RF (radio-frequency) signals, so you don't even have to be in the same room as your gear.

Podcasts, those audio recordings of your innermost thoughts that you share with every Internet-connected person on the planet, are easily done with a hodgepodge of hardware and software. But they're most easily done with M-Audio's Podcast Factory ($180), which has everything you need to record and edit your podcasts and post them as MP3 files on podcasting sites.

Sure, the Onkyo CS-V720 minisystem ($400) is willing and able to serve as a DVD/CD player, but this sleek little number doesn't merely spin discs. It's also XM radio-ready, which means that when you get an XM Connect & Play antenna ($20) and a subscription to the satellite service ($12.95 a month), 160 channels of music, sports, news, and more will be at your fingertips.

For the most part, DVD players have migrated to the two ends of the price spectrum: no-frills players that cost less than a pepper steak, and mega-high-end machines with a list of processors so long it's like browsing the Tokyo phone book. But Harman Kardon is hanging onto the middle ground with the DVD 47 ($399).

Good size, good price - what more could you ask for in a TV? Okay, yeah, high-definition would be nice, and Vizio's 37-inch L37 LCD set ($1,500) has that covered, too, sporting a screen with 1,366 x 768-pixel resolution.