Murphy's got this law, see? When you only have one working prototype of your new product, but you go ahead and set yourself to be the first press event for a room full of just fed journalists who are eager to hear or see something exciting, well then, you can rest assured knowing your prototype will crap out. That's what happened at 10 AM when the ZVOX 450 ZBIT the ZDUST just before the press arrived. Someone said it was a Bill Gates moment.

We did listen patiently as the many benefit of the single box, surround simulator were explained. The 5" deep x 7" high by 37" wide cabinet is meant to compete with the single box solution offered by Yamaha, for about half the price. Across the front are five drivers (right and left "surrounds" in the outer positions, three closely grouped center drivers in the middle span of the box, representing left, center and two side-firing slot loaded woofers said to reach down to 35 Hz, using Hafler matrix methodology to extract a center and surrounds from a two channel incoming analog matrix. No plans for a digital input.

Our heart goes out to ZVOX owner Tom Hannaher who did his best to describe the sound. Hey, Tom, that's usually our job!