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In a career spanning four decades, Sunfire's founder and chief designer Bob Carver has morphed from bushy to bald, young Turk to elder (or at least older) statesman, and iconoclast to anointed icon. Throughout, one thing neither he nor his designs has ever been is dull, and Sunfire's latest "Theater Grand" A/V receiver is no exception.

Algolith's Mosquito is an outboard video noise reduction device that Algolith describes as an "analog and digital compression artifact reducer." At $3000, it may be the most expensive device of its kind offered to consumers. It may also be the most sophisticated. If you judge your audio-video components by weight, it won't make much of an impact. But weight has little to do with the performance of this sort of product.

Home theater is the union of big-screen television and surround sound. Those are the two bedrock principles on which this magazine was founded. So, it may seem heretical to even consider modifying that second requirement. After all, the whole notion of home theater has matured in tandem with advances in both video and surround technology.

The battle of flat-screen technology is heating up, and LCD makers are fighting each other for technological superiority. As we reach the end of 2006, the production of 40-to-42-inch LCDs has grown, while pricing has reached parity with plasma displays in this size range. The list of competitive makers of LCDs in this size is exploding, creating a race to innovate. Enter Philips' latest flat panel, the 42PF9831D. This top-of-the-line LCD has a number of industry firsts, including Philips' own Aptura backlight. Aptura is designed to sharpen fast-moving images, solving one of LCD's common shortcomings. The 42PF9831D is a 1,366-by-768 high-definition display with Ambilight Full Surround technology, Philips' exclusive four-sided screen lighting system (more on this later). It also features Clear LCD signal processing—which works with the Aptura backlight for faster response time—CableCARD, a memory-card reader, and Pixel Plus 3 upconversion.