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Despite holiday season signs of an economic slowdown, the <A HREF="http://www.ce.org/">Consumer Electronics Association</A> is projecting a record year for 2001. CEA figures released at the end of December predict that factory-to-dealer shipments will increase to $95 billion, a significant improvement from the $89.7 billion total this year. Results for both 2000 and 1999 were up approximately $5 billion from the previous years' predictions. For that reason, the CEA may revise its predictions. A revision with predictions for individual product categories should appear during January's Consumer Electronics Show.

Twenty bucks buys plenty of processing power these days. If you're a manufacturer shopping for a DVD chip, <A HREF="http://www.cirruslogic.com/">Cirrus Logic Corporation's Crystal Semiconductor</A> has just what you're looking for. The San Mateo, CA-based company is now shipping its "98k"&mdash;an all-purpose, stand-alone DVD decoding device versatile enough to let designers write their own control code.

Audio considerations seem to be the top priority of most home-theater enthusiasts. But once you reach a certain plateau of sound quality you begin to take a good look at your video display, and most of us end up wanting a separate projector and screen for that real movie experience. At <I>SGHT</I>, we've reviewed some of the most exotic video-display products on the planet. But when the daydreaming stops, we realize that these projectors are the video equivalents of Ferraris. As much fun as they are to write and (we hope) read about, only a few lucky readers will ever park them in their homes.

A core tenet of stellar home theater reproduction calls for a system's ability to re-create infrasonic bass—the kind that drops so low that you no longer hear it, but you can feel it throughout the length of your alimentary canal. The kind of bass that threatens to shatter your gallstones. Of course, getting this kind of gut-whomping bass is relatively easy today, depending on your room's resonance nodes and the amount of greenbacks you can muster for the purchase of a foundation-rattling subwoofer.