Introduction Home Theater PCs (HTPCs) are becoming more and more prevalent in today’s most adventurous media rooms. HTPCs are being offered by some larger mainstream manufacturers, as well as smaller, specialized manufacturers, such as Vidabox, that focus on the “HT or home theater” portion of HTPC. Microsoft’s incorporation of media features in their Vista operating system all but ensures that PCs will remain in our home theaters. Vidabox, LLC is based in Garden City, New York, where co-founders Steven Cheung and Sergio DeAlbuquerque remain hands on in day-to-day operations. Vidabox was founded to design and build premium quality media centers and home theater PCs. The LUX model reviewed here is toward the higher end of the line. The LUX that is running in my home theater right now is different from every other HTPC that I have seen to date, in that it supports both the HD DVD and Blu-Ray formats. Niveus, a well-regarded competitor in ...

Introduction Home theater PCs are not so much a fad as they are the future. The sheer capability and versatility one gets from integrating a home theater PC into a home theater and/or whole-home AV network is staggering. Think about it. Consumers now have a single component that can catalogue and store all of their music, movies, television programs and even play the latest high-definition formats, such as Blu-ray and HD DVD, in a chassis not much larger than your standard DVD player. Throw in the fact that you can essentially make any computer, even the one you currently own, a home theater PC and you begin to see the prospect’s superb value and outrageous potential. For me, the biggest downside to home theater PCs is the PC part. Most home theater PCs are based around a Windows operating system that ultimately makes them somewhat user-friendly to the scores of PC users out there, ...

Introduction Nothing stays stagnant in nature or in consumer electronics. The VCR, one of the last vestiges of the analog world, is about to meet its successor and I don’t mean digital videotape. Personal TV (PTV) is a brand new product category. One of the first units comes from a joint venture between service provider TiVo and consumer electronics manufacturer Philips Electronics. More than just another black box, PTV uses an attractive and intuitive graphical user interface that overlays the TV broadcast signal. It’s possible to record shows and store them on the PTV’s internal hard drive. TiVo can also time-shift material, functioning as your own personal instant replay system. There are two differnet PTV components. For $499 you get a PTV unit capaible of recording upto 14 hours of TV programming. For $999 you can buy a machine with more hard drive space providing up to 30 hours of recording time. On top of ...

Introduction Let me begin by coming clean about probably being one of the bigger nerds at AVRev.com when it comes to the home theater techno-toys. I jumped at the opportunity to review an all-in-one media manager and the Escient DVDM-552 did not disappoint. Escient is not new to the arena of the music management category of home theater. With several management devices already successfully on the market, Escient was primed for a big splash when it released the DVDM-552 in early 2006. Escient is a division of D&M Holdings, which also owns familiar names such as Marantz, Denon, Boston Acoustics and McIntosh, none of them wimps in the home theater industry. The $5,999 DVDM-552 is a multi-zone music and movie manager targeted for use in a home theater. It slices, it dices and it purées all your media into one conveniently organized interface. It combines DVDs, Internet radio, SACDs, CDs and MP3s into three neatly ...

Introduction The iPod has heralded a new era in music, allowing us to store our music digitally on computers. But what are we to do when we want to listen to that music on our stereo systems? You can connect your iPod directly to your preamp or home theater controller with a patch cable, but it is difficult to see the screen from further than a few feet away. Many receivers have the ability to control the iPod, but the text on their display is small and/or your receiver may be tucked out of view. Some companies have systems that allow you to use your TV as the screen to interface with your iPod, but then you have to have your display on to listen to music and are still limited by the storage space of the device. Dedicated music servers can access your music and distribute it to various systems throughout your ...