OTHER TECH

"But what about that HDTV?" you're asking. Well, you'd be hard pressed to do better than Sony's Wega KV-40XBR700 40-inch HDTV monitor (reviewed in December 2001). Yes, its $3,499 price tag (before various dealer discounts) can seem steep, but you'd have a hard time finding another set that both looks this good and performs this well. And you definitely won't find another direct-view TV anywhere with a bigger screen. (You might also want to consider buying Sony's $499 TV stand. Designed to be a perfect fit with the KV-40XBR700, its striking triangular base includes frosted-glass shelves for storing components or discs.)

David Katzmaier was surprised to find that the Sony's "40-inch flat-screen glass picture tube . . . can draw out details in video images you probably never saw before. . . . Colors were very lifelike." Some people might say that buying an HDTV with a squarish 4:3 screen is a bad move. "Ha!," I say. As Katzmaier pointed out in his review, 16:9 widescreen pictures viewed on the KV-40XBR700 measure 36 inches diagonally - or "2 inches larger than almost all widescreen direct-view sets." Calling this Wega TV "a true statement of Sony's technological prowess," he concluded that "anyone seeking the best possible picture on the largest available direct-view screen will find [this TV] as irresistible as gravity."

Dear Gear Guy, I've loved playing with gadgets since I was a kid, and I'm now so good at designing them that I've made a small fortune doing it. But my entrepreneurial ways have left me with practically no time to update and tweak my home theater system, and the effects of my neglect are beginning to show. I want to start from scratch with a system that includes the best of all the latest gear, and I want everything to interact so well that I won't have to waste any time dealing with problems. And I want a big, big picture matched by big, big sound for my big, big room. That's a pretty tall order - can you fill it? - Gadget Freak

Dear Gadget Freak, No one can stump the Gear Guy! Here's a no-holds-barred, $25,000-plus system filled with all the latest goodies that will keep your tinkerer's heart happy and dazzle your friends, too.

You said you wanted to keep it simple. So why not start with a DVD player that can handle DVD-Video, DVD-Audio, and multichannel Super Audio CD (SACD) recordings with equal aplomb? But Pioneer's Elite DV-47A player ($1,200, reviewed in May) doesn't stop there. As David Ranada pointed out in his review, the DV-47A will "play any video or music disc you bring home [including] CD-ROM or CD-R/RW discs containing MP3 audio files . . . and DVD-R, DVD-RW, and DVD+RW discs." And it includes "a host of fine-tuning adjustments suited to the critical videophile."

Not only is the DV-47A an exceptional audio player - "Sound quality was stellar, with measurably and audibly clean reproduction that benefited all kinds of music, especially complex multichannel textures" - it's also a "state of the art" video player: "Images delivered via the progressive-scan component output looked particularly fine, especially on a large screen." Ranada concluded by saying that "Pioneer has demonstrated it's possible to build a truly universal DVD/SACD player that delivers top-quality performance on all of its audio and video outputs."

To be really cutting edge these days, though, you've got to have at least one hard-drive-based component in your system. Well, I'm going to recommend two.

The first is the Imerge SoundServer S1000 audio hard-disk recorder ($1,500, reviewed in May, "May We Serve You?"), which lets you avoid dealing with daisy-chained CD megachangers by storing a large chunk of your music collection (about 650 CDs' worth of compressed music) in one component. And once you've transferred your CDs to its 40-gigabyte (GB) hard drive, you can put all of the discs in storage. Daniel Kumin praised the Imerge for its "simplicity of operation, elegantly unadorned exterior, and top-flight performance." (It has one weird quirk, though - it won't let you just pop in a CD and hit play. You have to store the disc on the hard drive and then access the contents from there. But the company is providing a downloadable software upgrade to fix this.)