Not that McIntosh ever really went anywhere, but it was still pretty cool to see the retro glass front panels and cool blue and green fluorescents lighting up an entire 7.1-channel home theater system.

We listened to music on a Mac MS300 music server with capacity to hold up to 300 CDs using lossless FLAC encoding, before switching over to a MX135 pre/pro and a VP1000 video processor, which will come out next year around $10K by itself. Providing the video was a single-chip 1080p DLP from McIntosh, branded as the MDLP1. (McIntosh is now owned by D&M Holdings, the company that operates Denon and Marantz, and I’d be very surprised if this projector doesn’t have a lot in common with Marantz’s VP-11S1!)

Intent to prove that the DVD isn’t dead in these dog days of the format war, McIntosh played a clip from Robots and a yet-to-be-released Jet Li action film via 480i component video, which was then processed to 1080p by the VP1000 processor and sent to the projector via HDMI.

I don’t wish to be cruel, but the fact is that while the format war unequivocally sucks, after living with HD DVD for several months DVD’s shortcoming are painfully apparent and on a high quality 1080p projector there’s nowhere to hide. Edge enhancement and other artifacts were readily apparent; artifacts that simply don’t exist on HD DVD. It’s a new world and DVD is officially legacy video.