Devices View – Page 13 – a Techsponential Company

Sonos 2.0

August 5, 2008 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

Sonos announced several upgrades today to its whole-house audio system (my review of the original system is here). The receiver modules have shrunk in size, have been upgraded with an upgraded version of Sonos’ proprietary wireless mesh networking technology, and the one with an internal amplifier (the ZonePlayer 120) has gotten more power. The software has been upgraded, and it now supports ridiculously large music collections (65,000 songs), OS X Leopard, and NAS devices (networked hard drives, which means you can listen to your own songs without turning on your PC). What hasn’t changed: The Controller 100 ($399) gets no …

New Wireless HDTV Standard(s)

July 24, 2008 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

A bunch of big companies are getting together to standardize wireless home HDTV transmission. Again. The AP reports the details here. Most of the commentary I’ve seen has been fairly positive, though everyone points out that several of the big players backing WHDI are separately supporting WirelessHD as well. Could we have a standards war here? Jeremy Toeman is taking a contrarian stance, saying it doesn’t matter. He makes some good points: WHDI products aren’t expected to hit the market for at least a year or two Testing this stuff will take forever Even if it just adds $100 to …

Accessories

Monoprice’s HDMI Switcher – and its Customer Service – Work

July 8, 2008 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

A while back I tested ACCELL’s 4×2 HDMI switcher. In closing, I noted that budget cable site monoprice sells a similar unit for just $89, and "For $89, if it just turns on I’ll be impressed." Well, the first unit turned on, but didn’t do much more than that. The box was attractive and well packed – from a packaging perspective it inspired confidence. But it didn’t work. I could force it to manually switch between displays by turning one display off, the other on, and then unplugging/replugging the switch – not exactly what it is supposed to do. I …

Displays / Industry

In NYC next week? Come “Downtown”

June 4, 2008 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

If you’re in the Wall Street area next Thursday, I’ll be moderating a panel at Digital Downtown on Flat Panel TV Trends: Plasma and LCD TVs are the center of any digital home. The category’s success is driven by the produts’ fashion appeal and picture quality as well as the DTV transition. Listen to our panel of industry experts discuss the current trends affecting the flat panel TV market and where it’s heading. The session is free to financial analysts, press, and "invited guests." You can register here.

Audio / Computing

Product Review: Axiom Audio Audiobytes and EPZero Subwoofer

May 29, 2008 - by Avi Greengart - 7 Comments.

Axiom has been trying to get me to review a set of speakers from their home theater surround lineup, but I asked to start with something smaller, so they suggested their Audiobytes PC speaker system. I’ve been using what counts as “high end” speaker systems in the PC world on my media center PC for nearly a decade. My primary PC speaker system is a Klipsch THX Pro Media 5.1, which I have pitted against a 5.1 THX setup from Logitech, 2.1 systems from Altec Lansing, and others over the years. Axiom’s Audiobyte system consists of up to four pieces: …

Audio

Product Review: mStation 2.1 Stereo Tower

May 26, 2008 - by Avi Greengart - 4 Comments.

Against my parents’ wishes, all my aunts and uncles got together and bought me a cheap stereo system as a Bar Mitzvah gift. (My parents would have preferred a set of Talmud, a computer, sports equipment – literally anything that wasn’t a stereo system I could use to blast horrible rock and roll and annoy my father. Yes, I grew up in the movie Footloose.) It was a thing of beauty: a Fisher record player/tape deck/am/fm radio and a pair of speakers that were at least three feet tall. Oh, those speakers were huge, and the system could play much …

Accessories / Audio / Displays / HDTV

Product Review: Accell 4×2 HDMI Switcher

March 11, 2008 - by Avi Greengart - 3 Comments.

HDMI was supposed to bring the home theater world from the confusing age of multiple cables for audio and video (and sometimes multiple audio cables and multiple video cables) down to just a single cable from each component to your display. If your display doesn’t have enough HDMI inputs for all your sources, you need an HDMI switcher or a receiver which has an HDMI switcher built in. Then you need an HDMI cable from the each source to the switcher or receiver, but just one from there to the display. Fortunately, even some budget receivers now have HDMI switching …

Displays

Come on in, the 1080p water’s fine!

February 27, 2008 - by Avi Greengart - 2 Comments.

Evan Powell over at ProjectorCentral has a short article on the massive drop in 1080p projector prices and he notes that this, plus the end of the format war, makes now an ideal time to buy. He’s not kidding. In some cases prices on models introduced just four months ago have fallen by hundreds of dollars as newer models have hit the market. The price on the Panasonic PT-AE2000U I bought at the end of the year seems to be holding steady; I’m not sure whether that means there is higher demand for this model — certainly a possibility — …

Uncategorized

HD-DVD is dead, but did Blu-ray win?

February 20, 2008 - by Avi Greengart - 1 Comment

The quick post-mortem on HD-DVD: It was a better standard in almost every way but capacity (and double layer HD-DVD discs made even that a moot point). Blu-ray can be spectacular, but the specification is still evolving. HD-DVD died because consumers bought more Blu-ray discs. Consumers bought more Blu-ray discs because there were more Blu-ray players sold. There were more Blu-ray players sold because most of those were Sony Playstation 3’s (PS3). Thus, Sony’s decision to include a Blu-ray player in the PS3 was the primary factor in the death of HD-DVD. That doesn’t mean Sony won. First, Jeremy Toeman …

Industry

CES 2008: GizmodoGate

January 15, 2008 - by Avi Greengart - Leave a Comment

[Warning: rant coming] GizmodoGate really bothered me. I was at that Motorola press conference. This was Moto’s first time talking to press/analysts in the post-Zander era, and they kept starting and stopping and starting and stopping. It was annoying for me to watch, and very hard for them to tell a smooth story. If Gizmodo had characterized this as a prank gone badly wrong and apologized, it might have been forgivable (after all, some of us do have a sense of humor). Instead, Gizmodo’s unrepentent response left a really bad taste in my mouth. I’ve been a marketing professional in …