The concept of "plug and play" is a starry-eyed consumer-electronics fantasy. In my experience, almost all home entertainment devices - at least the kinds covered in this magazine - need some sort of setup to achieve optimum performance. Heck, even my first childhood record player had to have the volume adjusted.
First it was shark attacks and the Gary Condit debacle, and then came September 11. The year 2001 wasn't a great one overall, but it was pretty good for high-definition television (HDTV), which continues to make steady advances despite the drooping economy.
Audio buffs have been known to lock horns over all kinds of things - CDs vs. vinyl, Dolby Digital vs. DTS, tubes vs. solid-state, DVD-Audio vs. Super Audio CD, and on and on. But one of the hottest debates of recent years has been over which kind of speakers work best for the rearward surround channels in a multichannel setup: monopole (a.k.a. direct-radiating) or dipole?
Let me make one thing perfectly clear. This is not your father's stereo. In fact, it's not his home theater either. Kenwood has come up with a networked home entertainment system that promises to provide easy access to movies from a DVD megachanger and music from a variety of sources, including CDs, MP3 music files stored on a hard-disk drive - even Internet radio stations.
Running with a stack of my favorite CDs compressed into a player no larger than a deck of cards, I set a personal best on the trail around the Central Park Reservoir.
You wouldn't know it to look at the "mine's bigger than yours" installations featured in some home theater magazines, but having a decent amount of money to spend on a whole-house audio/video system doesn't necessarily translate into gaudy opulence. Or, to put it another way, modesty isn't always dictated by a limited budget.
For a century we've been industriously broadcasting radio programs all across the globe, with the great majority of programs received free of charge. After light bulbs, radios are probably the most ubiquitous electrical devices on earth. Radio is cool. Life is good.
He may not have known all the chords . . . but he knew "a lot more than we knew," as John Lennon said, remembering the day in 1957 when Paul McCartney introduced him to George Harrison. And that was enough for John to agree with Paul that George should join them in the band that would eventually become, with Ringo Starr, the Beatles.
Ever since that Philips commercial where a European-looking couple try hanging their thin TV in every room of a minimalist apartment, finally settling for a spot on the ceiling above the bed, plasma sets have been creating a stir. From airports to movie theaters to corporate boardrooms, these slimmed-down big-screen TVs draw stares from almost everybody.
KENWOOD/BOSTON UNITYDimensions (WxHxD) main unit, 18 x 33/4 x 161/8 inches; subwoofer, 14 x 13 7/8 x 13 3/4 inches System weight 45 1/2 pounds Price $1,000
If the major record labels have their way, that bright red "record" indicator on your CD burner or personal computer could eventually become as unresponsive as the long-wave band on a vintage AM radio. Some of the labels have already released music discs that prevent you from using your computer to make digital copies on either recordable CDs or the computer's hard drive.
At $2,800, the least expensive Vaio PC in Sony's MX desktop line doesn't seem like much of a bargain these days, even for a 1.7-GHz, Pentium 4 with an 80-gigabyte (GB) hard drive, 512 megabytes (MB) of memory, the exciting "home" version of Windows XP, and two better-than-average speakers (the 15-inch Sony LCD monitor shown is $600 extra).
Okay, I know I shouldn't gloat. But I told you so. In a keynote speech at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) annual convention a year ago, I warned that if the broadcast and cable industries didn't get their act together when it came to putting high-definition signals out there in a big way, high-def programming would be provided by other means.
Four of Hollywood's home-video heavies - DreamWorks, 20th Century Fox, Artisan Entertainment, and Universal Studios - have thrown their weight behind a format for distributing films in high-definition, the JVC-developed D-Theater variant of D-VHS.
