WINDOWS 1080P If you loved Legos as a kid, a Media Center PC will fulfill your need to build stuff in a grown-up, home theater kind of way. Niveus's Rainier, an "entry-level" model in the Summit series, gives you unprecedented tools: an HD DVD drive and an HDMI output capable of feeding your display 1080p video.
CLIMBING THE LADDER Now in its second generation, Toshiba's flagship HD DVD player can finally provide 1080p video output - the top dog among HDTV formats. The HD-XA2's state-of-the-art HDMI 1.3 output can send both video and digital sound, including the new lossless Dolby and DTS formats, straight to your HDTV or receiver over one perfectly convenient cable.
SOUND COUNTS It's tough to pick the perfect home theater gear: You want something that'll impress your A/V-junkie friends but still be easy enough for your girlfriend to use. Cambridge Audio's Azur 640R receiver comes at you with serious audiophile cred - seven discrete 100-watt amps, all well-isolated from the digital processor and input stages.
DOME IF YOU WANT TO So you need to pimp your ride with the ultimate speakers because your car tunes are that important - and you wanna shut up the dude down the block who goes on about his titanium tweeters (that match his titanium wheels, naturally)? Throw in a set of Focal's high-end Utopia BE component speakers, and tell that sucka that titanium is just so '90s.
You may not realize it, but space on your rack is valuable, and having gotten a slot, certain parties are determined to multi-task as much as possible. One of them is Microsoft. Starting on November 22 the behemoth of Redmond will start bringing TV and movies—including high-def material—to the Xbox 360 gaming console with content from CBS, MTV, Paramount, Turner, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), and Warner. Some content will be download-to-own, some download-to-rent. Prices were not announced. TV stuff will include condensed NASCAR races, UFC's "most intense fights," and from CBS: episodes of CSI, Jericho, Numb3rs, and remastered Star Trek. Not many movie titles were announced except for Warner's The Matrix, Superman Returns, and Batman Forever. More content listed here, press release here.
Windows Vista launches November 30 to corporate customers and January 30 to consumers. Will the next version of Windows become the next big thing in high-end audio circles? There certainly are some interesting features listed in this tutorial from the Windows Vista Team Blog. For instance, bass management applies in both forward (LFE sent from main to sub channels) and reverse ("mapped back into the main channels"). There's "loudness equalization" to maintain even volume levels among different sources. "Speaker fill" seems to be the Microsofting of Dolby Pro Logic II though whether it will work equally as well remains to be seen (in my experience, nothing works as well as DPLII). Perhaps most ambitious, Vista will have its own "room correction" circuit, using microphone input to tweak delay, frequency response, and gain. "This technology works differently than similar features in high-end receivers since it better accounts for the way the human ear processes sound," says product manager Nick White. We'll see about that! While we're puckering up for Microsoft, check out Gizmodo's Happy Birthday, Windows XP. Five years old and still faithfully serving 400 million users.
