LATEST ADDITIONS

Custom Installation How-To
A DVD Christmas
David Ranada  |  Nov 10, 2002
Photos by Tony Cordoza

Like Santa descending a chimney every year with an ever-larger bag of goodies, DVD players have been coming down in price while their bundles of features have expanded.

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Audio Video News
Spider-Man on DVD
Thomas J. Norton  |  Nov 10, 2002

<I>Tobey Maguire, Willem Dafoe, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Cliff Robertson, Rosemary Harris, J.K. Simmons, Gerry Becker, Bill Nunn, Jack Betts, Stanley Anderson, Ron Perkins. Directed by Sam Raimi. Aspect ratio: 1.85:1 (anamorphic). Dolby Digital 5.1 (English, French), Dolby Surround (English). Two discs. 121 minutes. 2002. Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment 09661. PG-13. $29.99.</I>

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Audio Video News
CE Makers, Cable Industry Agree on Standards
 |  Nov 10, 2002

The rollout of HDTV may finally get rolling, thanks to an agreement reached the first week of November by consumer electronics manufacturers and representatives of the cable television industry.

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Audio Video News
TiVo, SonicBlue Settle Dispute
Barry Willis  |  Nov 10, 2002

Everything seems to be roses and lollipops for <A HREF="http://www.tivo.com">TiVo</A> and <A HREF="http://www.sonicblue.com">SonicBlue</A>, maker of ReplayTV devices. The Silicon Valley rivals are allies now that they've decided to put their time and money into promoting digital video recorders (DVRs) rather than fighting each other.

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Audio Video News
Added to the Archives This Week
 |  Nov 10, 2002

Steven Stone takes on the <A HREF="http://www.guidetohometheater.com/showarchives.cgi?60">Earthquake SuperNova MKIV-15 subwoofer</A>, asking "What would a movie be without low-frequency effects?" SS takes a subterranean tour with the MKIV-15 to see how well it handles the big boom.

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Audio Video News
DVD Burners Get Hot
Barry Willis  |  Nov 10, 2002

Is the movie industry on the verge of losing control of its own products?

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Krell DVD Standard DVD player
Fred Manteghian  |  Nov 07, 2002

High-priced DVD players are an almost anachronistic concept in today's cheaper-by-the-minute world. In fact, if I set up a card table at the local warehouse price club and offered sips of unsweetened cranberry juice to shoppers while clandestinely questioning them about the going rate for an <I>expensive</I> DVD player, their predictable guesses of around $500 would only confirm how out of sync audiophiles and videophiles are with the average Joe.

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EAD DVDMaster 8000 Pro DVD player
Steven Stone  |  Nov 07, 2002

Once upon a time, several professors and associates from a small college in Fairfield, Iowa, formed an audiophile company named Enlightened Audio Designs. More widely known by its initials, little EAD created state-of-the-art 2-channel equipment whose performance rivaled products from much larger companies. When it became clear that home theater would become a major force in the market, they jumped into it with gusto, producing the TheaterMaster audio processor, SwitchMaster video processor, Theater Vision LD transport, and PowerMaster amplifier&mdash;all within a year of the first multichannel product rollouts.

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Custom Installation How-To
Design the Ultimate Home Theater– On a Budget
Mike Wood  |  Nov 04, 2002  |  First Published: Nov 05, 2002
Part two: Construction and acoustic treatment.

Last month, I introduced some basic concepts to help you design the ultimate home theater. For those of you who missed it, we invited three home theater design gurus to help us build a new listening room: Anthony Grimani, Russ Herschelmann, and Norm Varney. I tried to cover everything you'd need to build a great home theater, regardless of your budget. This month, I continue that approach as I discuss the construction and acoustic treatment of our room.

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Bookshelf Speaker Reviews
Mirage Omnisat 6 Speaker System
Steve Guttenberg  |  Nov 04, 2002  |  First Published: Nov 05, 2002
Listening outside the pod.

Mirage's VP of engineering, Ian Paisley, went bipolar way back in 1987. Hold on a sec, let me restate that: Paisley designed the first commercially successful bipolar loudspeaker, the Mirage M-1, in 1987. That speaker garnered raves in all of the audiophile mags and put Mirage on the map. Ah, but do bipolar/wide-dispersion speakers always produce great sound? It all depends. People have criticized some omnidirectional speakers for their overly diffuse, vaguely defined imaging. While I've never owned a set of Mirages, I've been a fan of this sort of speaker since I bought a pair of "direct/reflecting" Bose 501 speakers in '76. Hey, I was still wet behind my not-yet-golden ears, and Bose's dispersion concept caught my fancy. My Bose affair was a quickie, and I eventually settled down for a long-term relationship with a pair of Quad ESL-63 (dipole) electrostatic speakers.

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