NHT has come a long way, or a different way, or, whatever. Their A/V pre/pro, bundled with five speakers, two self-powered subs, five 4-channel amps (one for each speak), plus, uh, wires I think, goes for $40,000! Each of the amp's channels is responsible for one of the four drivers in each speaker, so there is no crossover in the speakers themselves. Of course, in the middle of the convention hall you couldn't get much of a feel for the systems sound. I would have liked to have heard an isolated room demo.

THX is working a new connect-the-world project, code named Blackbird. Having seen how easy it is for the general public to mangle their picture and sound with all the new toys they've been acquiring recently, Blackbird presents a solution for the three cardinal sins of home theater, by sending metadata in the form of control signals through HDMI to all Blackbird enabled devices in the chain.

Shane already nailed the Epson Cinema Pro 1080 UB ("Ultra Black") demo. It was amazing to see this kind of performance from an LCD. I'll add that Epson might be claiming a 50,000:1 contrast ratio, but that's with what has to be an awfully aggressive auto-iris in play. Kevin Miller, whose work continues to amaze, flew without a net using the chipset's native contrast ratio of 4,500:1, which is pretty outstanding on its own.

Richard Schneider, founder of Terrestrial Digital, is right about one thing: there's plenty of free over-the-air high definition signals out there for anyone willing to try. And the signal quality is generally better than anything off a small satellite or cable. Terrestrial Digital's new line of ClearStream antennas are small and practically invisible compared to the 14' Yagi monster I've got on my roof.