LATEST ADDITIONS

No matter how much bigger your TV is than mine, no matter how much higher the resolution or how much brighter the image, there's one hitherto immutable aspect that both TVs have in common—the pictures on our respective TV screens are two-dimensional. They've got height. They've got width. But they ain't got depth. (Talk about flat-screen TV!) The final frontier of TV viewing is the third dimension; try as we might, watching a good 3D image on TV has always seemed about as impossible as Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera starring in a performance of Verdi's Aida as a fund raiser for PBS.

When I reviewed the Integra Research RDC-7 preamplifier-processor in our February 2001 issue, I waxed enthusiastic about the unit's promised upgradeability—on that issue's cover, we even tagged it "Ready for Y3K!" Amid the Dolby/DTS battles of a few years ago, when a new "must-have" surround format was sent into the fray every six months, such an upgradeable chassis was exciting and welcome.

Photos by Tony Cordoza As I unpacked Athena Technologies' Audition Series home theater speakers, I recalled that Athena was the Greek goddess of wisdom, reason, and purity. Was it wise and reasonable, I wondered, to expect purity of sound from a six-piece system that costs less than $1,500? If anyone could make such a system, though, I figured Athena could.

It's easy to visualize the operation of a CRT projector: three tubes, each operating much as the picture tube in the TV on your kitchen counter, flashing overlapping red, green, and blue analog images onto the screen. If you have a good model in top operating condition, and if you or your installer have slaved over its setup, you'll see an incredible picture—one that, on a home-size screen (not so large as to accentuate a CRT's main limitation of light output), is still as good as home video gets.