New Products

Scanning some of the myriad Black Friday websites—my favorite is bfads.net because you can search by product category from multiple retailers—I found a few great deals on home theater gear. In many cases, however, these products are already available at less than the MSRP (manufacturer's suggested retail price), so the savings I cite here might not be as great as they appear. I've included links to HT's reviews of the same or similar items if available, so let your mouse do the clicking before you venture forth to battle the hordes.

Since returning to independence under the leadership of founder Chris Byrne in 2007, NHT has moved on from its DSP-focused experimental phase (which resulted in interesting products like the Xd), emphasizing straightforward, high-quality, reasonably priced speakers.

British manufacturer Monitor Audio has a deserved reputation for well-designed, high-performing speaker systems, and the latest offerings in the company's line of iOS device docks, the i-deck 100 and 200, follow in those footsteps. And now they can be yours.

The Rocky Mountain Audio Fest is growing up. A few years ago, it was known as a gathering of small (sometimes one-man) companies demonstrating exotic (sometimes downright wacky) audio products. Some of those guys are still there, but so now are most of the better-known high-end audio companies.

S+V dropped by the Beats by Dr. Dre/Monster Cable holiday product preview last night, to check out what the company had to offer to follow up on the Beats Pro headphones we looked at in this month's headphone shootout.

Been looking for a portable speaker system to go along with your iOS device? iHome's long-awaited iW1 battery-powered AirPlay speaker is finally here. The iW1 was one of the first announced AirPlay speakers - and while it was slow out of the gate, it's now set to be the first available truly wireless AirPlay device.

It's curious enough to find venerable speaker companies getting into the headphone business, but the announcement today by Apple accessories specialists InCase of an all-new - and very complete - line of headphones is even more of a surprise.