Although it's hard to see from the picture above, Fiberoptic Studio's iSky Panels are acoustical panels that include built-in LED star fields. The pre-built panels (24", 30", and 48" square) hook together in a grid using daisy-chain wiring, so it's supposed to be extremely easy for an installer to turn a home theater's ceiling into a night sky for significantly less than it used to cost. In addition to making your home theater look very cool, it'll help with the acoustics, too. The installed system in the StJohn Group's booth was definitely a "highlight" of the Show so far.
Nuvo's new Essentia NV-E6G system is a six-zone, six-source system that's packaged with six Control Pads (each with a 1" OLED display). It's expandable up to 12 zones, and is plug-and-play compatible with Nuvo's M3 Music Server, T2 Dual Tuners, and NuVoDocks for iPod. At $2,299 - less than $400 per room - that's a pretty smokin' deal for six rooms of music.
Released just last week, DVDO’s iScan VP50Pro is the first THX Certified scaler. It also has HDMI 1.3, and will accept and spit out just about every resolution you can imagine. Along with deinterlacing of 1080i and below, there is also mosquito noise reduction, detail enhancements, and just about every other goody you’d expect from a scaler. It’s $3,500.
Behold the BH200. This time there is full HD DVD support, 1080p/24/30 and 60. It’s available in mid-October for $999. No multi-channel analog outputs though…
It’s $999, has HQV processing, plays Blu-ray and HD DVD. What else do you need to know? Oh, the model number probably. BD-UP5000. Look for it before the end of the year. What a coincidence it’s the same price as the product in the post below…
Here’s a better pic of the Sharp BD player, the BD-HP20U, that I talked about many posts below. Turns out the “10 seconds on” is not exactly true, that’s if the player is already on and ready to go. From what they were telling me, it will still turn on quickly from off, but not that quickly.
Mitsubishi announced the HC6000, an update of the HC5000. They seem to have addressed all the issues we had with the 5000, such as the slow iris, and tiny menu size, but kept the things we liked, like the HQV processing and the low price. In fact, that got a bit lower, the HC6000 is “under $4000” and should be available in the middle of October.
Planar, the biggest company you’ve never heard of, has really hit the ground running at CEDIA this year. Fresh off their purchase of the fabled Runco brand, Planar showed off several new 1080p projectors.
The Clark Synthesis Stringless Quartet actually had sound coming out of a stringless violin, viola, cello, and bass. There were voice coils in back making the instruments resonate like magnificent speaker drivers. Unfortunately it was an attention-getting tactic for a more prosaic seat-activating product.
Five new sound-bar products from Yamaha include the YSP-4000 ($1800), with 5.1 channels in one convenient box. It does XM, FM, and iPod with optional dock. And it offers a greater range of surround adjustments from the remote than previous products. Whizzing race cars illustrated how well it works.
The Tannoy Ellipse is part of the Studio Monitor range. Long available in versions with eight- or ten-inch woofers for $4000-8000, this egg-like speaker's dual concentric drivers and top-mount super-tweeters are common fixtures in recording studios, we're told. It's been available for years but is new to us, and we like to make every CEDIA a voyage of discovery. What is in fact new is the i30 iPod docking system, not pictured, because we're perverse that way. It has two 4-inch drivers and will be out in October for $499. Worth it? We'd like to find out.
Revel's new in-ceiling line includes two 6.5-inch models, the round IC-65 and rectangular IW-65 (both $600). There's also a round eight-incher, IC-80 ($800). Advanced waveguides grace all three. The rectangular guy also has boundary compensation to tailor its response to the room. In addition, Revel has its own version of a flat-diaphragm speaker that also appears in other Harman International lines.
The new speaker lines from Mordaunt-Short include the Alumni, shown, with compact satellites, a fairly big center, and sub for $1000. Also new is the larger Mezzo, a step down from the Reference Series, with tweeter top-mounted in separate subenclosure.
Among Monitor's 18 new products are three in-wall/ceiling models. From left to right they are the C380FX ($500/each), W380LCR ($600/each), and C380LCR ($600/each). The latter two feature coaxial driver arrays with an unusual twist: the woofer is convex, not concave, so it follows the shape of the dome tweeter. And the whole driver assembly swivels, so it has a better chance of hitting the right seating position.
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