Quiet Solution makes a variety of products designed to keep your home theater room quiet – both inside and out – such as QuietRock drywall panels and QuietWood for floors and the like. Now you can even soundproof the door in your home theater with the company’s QuietHome doors, which are about as heavy and dense as a door you might find on one of the Egyptian pyramids (of course, they didn’t have hinges then). The door ships pre-hung, and the frame includes a foam-like gasket that seals the door when it’s closed. There’s also a gasket the seals the bottom of the door against the threshold. A 2.25” THX certified version is available for $1,995. The 1.75” non-certified version is $1,499, which the company says is up to 50% less than other acoustic doors.
Since you’re reading this on a computer, you’re obviously on the cutting edge. You can get even more edgier by subscribing to the digital version of Home Theater Magazine using Zinio for your iPhone, iPad, or computer. 12 issues are only $9.75.
Further dashing the hopes of all those who long for a return to the days when a really big big-screen TV occupied more space in your living room than a pair of side-by-side refrigerators (and just about as stylish), Sharp recently unveiled a prototype 65-inch diagonal LCD HDTV - giving them, for the moment, possession of the official "World's Largest LCD Color TV" plaque. Prior to Sharp's announcement, the people who get paid to pontificate on such things ("panel pundits") had proclaimed a probable production-size limitation in the mid-forty inches for LCD TV diagonals. (Stunned by seeing proof that such a large screen size was possible, many of these panel pundits quickly switched to politics or weather forecasting, neither of which require much accuracy or accountability.)
The first step in overcoming any problem is admitting that you have one, so I'll admit that I don't normally like LCD projectors. There's no point in hiding the fact—it was bound to come out. Of course, I'm ashamed to admit that I'm prejudiced against an entire class of display devices. This is America, after all, where products should be judged on merit and not the composition of their pixels. But, you know, they're fine for other people. It's just not the kind of projector I'd have in my living room . . . . So, I was fully prepared not to like Sharp's XV-DW100U LCD projector. Sure, it can accept input signals from an analog NTSC tuner all the way up to 720p and 1080i from an outboard DTV tuner. So what if it easily connects to your computer, too? All right, it is amazingly easy to set up. OK, it works as a front or rear, floor or ceiling projector. I'll even give you the fact that it's a blast to watch. But, hey, it's still an LCD projector, remember?
Sharp wants to sell LCD TVs to everyone, including gamers. They call gamers a “special market”. For these “special” people, Sharp is offering the second generation Gaming GP-3 Series of 1080p LCD HDTVs. If you’re a die-hard gamer with $1,599 to spend on a 32-inch LCD TV, you can have your choice of piano black, dark red wine, and white.
You can run wires, but you can't hide from the fact that today's in-walls sound better than ever.
If only Sheetrock dust were an aphrodisiac. After hacking and ripping my way through the installation of eight pairs of in-wall and in-ceiling speakers and one monumental pair of in-wall subwoofers, I'd be damn near the sexiest man alive. As it is, after the White Sands National Monument, my lungs are now the biggest repository of gypsum dust on the planet. Once again, I've risked life and limb to survey the state of the custom-install speaker industry and give you a feel for what your money can buy in terms of ease of installation, aesthetics, and—most importantly—sound quality.
It’s been a long year since CEDIA 2010 when Emotiva Pro first showed a high-performance pre/pro with a fully integrated Control4 controller built in. In the meantime, Emotiva Pro morphed/merged/acquired/became Sherbourn; and the new/old company says the PT-7020C4 media processor/controller should be ready to roll in just a few weeks. The PT-7020C4 is a full-blown pre/pro with 5 HDMI 1.4 ports that’s “fully 3D compatible” and “offers a true hardware bypass for direct, unprocessed 3D streams to the video monitor” in addition to having a Genesis/Torino scaling engine. The PT-7020C4 also features dual 32-bit DSPs, balanced XLR connections, and full Ethernet control.
Think of all the memories you want to save: your baby's first steps; your daughter's first wedding; your son's first red card in a soccer game; your mother-in-law's - no, you probably don't want to save anything to do with your mother-in-law.
Noise-cancelling headphones are great for travelling and using in noisy public environments, but they’re not terribly useful when you want to watch a movie in your home theater. There, things like Sony PS3s, NAS drives, satellite receivers, and any other device with a built-in cooling fan that may happen to be sitting in your equipment rack – including, sometimes, cooling fans for the rack, itself – can be irritating sources of background noise that take away from the enjoyment of whatever it is you’re watching. Silentium’s AcoustiRACK ACTIVE (ARA) combines passive noise reduction with the company’s unique and highly effective active noise cancellation technology to achieve pretty incredible noise reduction levels of up to 30 dB. The ARA is specifically designed for data centers with racks of servers and other noisy, heat-producing components and has the ability to dissipate up to 8 KW of heat while also protecting the gear from dust. While I was at the Silentium booth, the folks there demonstrated how well their active noise cancellation technology is by displaying two wooden cabinets with identical exhaust fans built into the top. The first cabinet contained the fan and nothing else – and was appropriately noisy. The second cabinet included Silentium’s circuitry and hardware within the cabinet – and it was very noticeable how much more quiet the fan was compared to the untreated display cabinet. Silentium’s ARA racks (in 15U and 33U sizes) cost multiple thousands of dollars each, but the Silentium representative said the technology could potentially be adapted to home AV racks, as well.
Canton's fine people pulled us aside to show off the new CD 3200. It's a sleek, beautiful, contemporary-looking silver tower that has an internal 200-watt IcePower amp and four aluminum 4-inch mid/bass drivers and one of Canton's ADT-25 aluminum-manganese tweeters with a 2-1/2-way crossover. The CD 3200s are $1600 each.
Darryl Wilkinson
Site Map / Direct Links
