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Other Tech
The Gadget Girl: High-tech holiday cheer ranges from décor-friendly acoustic treatment to eggnog on wheels
Jamie Sorcher  |  Dec 05, 2006

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Other Tech
Accell UltraAV 2-1 HDMI Switch
Al Griffin  |  Dec 05, 2006

Accell's UltraAV HDMI 2-1 Switch The good thing about HDMI is that it reduces the wire tangle in an A/V system by carrying digital high-def video and multichannel audio signals on a single cable. The bad thing is that many HDTVs sold over the past few years have only one HDMI input.

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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Scanning High-Def
Josef Krebs  |  Dec 05, 2006

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Other Tech
Ask the Expert: Surround Speaker Placement
 |  Dec 05, 2006

Q. I watched a special on Discovery Channel called "Home Theater Revolution," and the theater expert built a room for a family to watch movies. He put the surround speakers on the back wall, as opposed to on the side walls facing in.

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Ears On
Sony Ships Blu-ray--Prices to Halve?
Mark Fleischmann  |  Dec 05, 2006
Sony's long-awaited BDP-S1 Blu-ray player has finally hit the shelves. It does 1080 lines at 24 frame per second for the ultimate in filmlikeness. And it's not just a product--it's a punctuation mark, adding "an exclamation point to Sony’s full HD 1080 line of products, which ranges from BRAVIA™ flat-panel LCD and Grand WEGA SXRD® rear-projection televisions to the new PlayStation® 3 game console, Blu-ray Disc enabled VAIO computers, PC drives and recordable BD media," says the press release. Speaking of Sony HDTVs, did you catch the secret sale from November 24-27? Too bad, so sad. The BDP-S1 sells for $1000, not bad by early-adopter standards, but if you can wait till 2008, the cost of a Blu-ray drive will drop 50 percent, according to DigiTimes. Of course, just because a major component drops in price, that doesn't necessarily mean that a product will do the same--but given the fact that a BD drive is the major component of a BD player, we might entertain hopes.
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New Products
New Product: Sunfire Theater Grand Receiver 3
Peter Pachal  |  Dec 04, 2006

LARGE AND IN CHARGE Are you serious about home theater? No, are you serious? Okay then, you may be worthy to own the Sunfire Theater Grand Receiver 3. Among its legendary features: HDMI switching, three (!) subwoofer outputs, and a power rating that'll make lesser receivers cower - 200 watts for each of the seven channels.

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New Products
New Product: Harman Kardon DMC1000F Digital Media Center
Peter Pachal  |  Dec 04, 2006

SERVICE CENTER Harman Kardon's first media server takes your discs and makes them better. Any CD you feed it will be ripped to the convenient 160-GB hard disk. Any DVD you feed it will be upconverted to 720p HD format through the HDMI output. But streaming is this box's main mission: four rooms, four streams - mix 'em however you want.

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New Products
Road Gear: Blaupunkt PCA 465 Four-Channel Amplifier
Doug Newcomb  |  Dec 04, 2006

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Home Theater Systems Reviews
Onkyo HT-S990THX Integrated Home Theater System
Mark Fleischmann  |  Dec 04, 2006  |  First Published: Nov 13, 2006
THX certification in a box.

A recent story on Salon.com discussed the chocolate craze. Apparently, there's a new category of high-end chocolate, writes Oliver Broudy in "The Sweet Smell of Snobbery." It comes complete with its own specs—the higher the percentage of cocoa solids, the better. There's jargon, of course, including terroir, which refers to the cocoa-growing region. And there are postprandial rituals in which celebrants are encouraged to taste 400 different flavors in one little bite. While I may ridicule this phenomenon, I would never condemn it, as long as people have a good time. Also, I happen to love dark chocolate.

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Media Server Reviews
Here, There, and Everywhere
Chris Chiarella  |  Dec 04, 2006  |  First Published: Nov 04, 2006
New streaming and networking options for the home and beyond.

Sling Media
I bet our founding fathers came to this same conclusion: One of the obstacles to true freedom is the necessity of wrapping your mind around the new benefits that await you. Take the Slingbox. It's a revolutionary piece of hardware, if you can grasp the relationship between audio, video, and networking. It takes the signal from any standard home entertainment device and streams it to a computer elsewhere in your house—or via the Internet to a laptop, desktop, and even certain phones. The best source component to use with the Slingbox is a DVR, as it combines live TV with stored content and recording capability, all of which you can control remotely.

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