Introduction If you are in the market for a rear-projection TV, chances are you have heard the terms DLP, LCD, SXRD and maybe HD-ILA. DLP’s commercials brag about “millions of tiny mirrors” that produce an HD picture with a spinning color wheel. Although the color wheels in single-chip DLP sets are getting faster and have more segments than they did just a few years ago, I believe the more moving parts that a TV has, the greater the chance for errors, such as the “screen door” and “rainbow” effects, as well as long-term maintenance problems. LCD direct-view TVs are currently the hottest thing on the market, but rear-projection LCD TVs never gained popularity and had a soft picture and weak black levels. Sony’s current rear-projection technology is called SXRD and is a three-chip micro-display technology that uses liquid crystals instead of individual mirrors. JVC has their own “flavor” of this liquid crystal on silicone technology, ...

Introduction JL Audio is very well known to many audio enthusiasts for their powerful yet accurate car audio speaker products. Those who think today’s car audio world is limited to the guy blasting ear-destroying rap while driving down your street as all there is have a lot to learn. State-of-the-art car audio offers consumers willing to customize their cars’ audio and video systems many of the same tricks that you would expect to see in a ModernHomeTheater.com featured installation. JL’s specialty for more than a decade has been building and designing some of the most impressive, tight and powerful subwoofers you could ever hope to put in your trunk. Logic would suggest that repackaging JL’s excellent car audio subwoofers for the home theater and audiophile market would be a no-brainer, but JL would stop you right there. Their home theater subwoofers are anything but repackaged car audio speaker systems. These woofers are as serious as ...

Introduction I started my journey in home theater some 10 years ago with the biggest home theater of them all, a 12-screen multiplex. I was a projectionist for the Colorado division of the famous Mann Theatres chain. Six days a week, I got to play with some of the coolest gear on the planet and at the heart of it all was none other than JBL. In fact, during all my years as a projectionist, every theater I worked for featured JBL sound systems. When it came time to build my own home theater some years ago, I went with what I knew. Since then, my system and tastes have gone through countless changes, from electrostatics to single-ended triodes. Yet, when I look back at my early days in home theater, what I remember most is the stupid grin on my face every time I fired up the JBLs. JBL is the brainchild ...

Introduction Now that the market is heating up with respect to HDTV, and people’s attention is being drawn to the highest ASTC-approved HDTV resolution of 1920 x 1080p and the best way to display it, only JVC and Sony have come to market so far with commercial designs worthy of re-mortgaging your house. DLP 2K products are currently only beginning to be available at Texas Instruments-equipped movie theaters around the world, and LCD 2K products simply have not been very inspiring up to this point. JVC has, of course, been offering its LCOS (Liquid Crystal On Silicon) variation, D-ILA (Directdrive Image Light Amplifier), since 1998, but only recently have they offered a projector with a trio of 1920 x 1080p panels. JVC’s D-ILA HD2K System ($19,995 MSRP) comes with a slide projector-sized light engine (created by JVC, measuring 11-3/4 x 5-1/4 x 14-3/16 inches), which has a black plastic exterior with manual zoom and focus ...

History Since the first days of commercially available digital projectors, I have been a convert. A mere four years ago, I owned an older Sony seven-inch CRT video projector paired with the all-time classic video processor, the Faroudja LD100. The picture looked smooth and film-like. It also had no brightness, barely being able to light up a 100-inch 4:3 Stewart Filmscreen StudioTek 130 screen, and switching inputs was a nightmare. Working on the projector required a professional technician, which means that in order to keep the sucker converged, I needed a trip from Dr. Feelgood every three to four months. While having a big screen to watch hockey games was cool, the work needed to get such a video picture was trying, to say the least. All of this changed in 2002, when I invested in a Madrigal Imaging MPD-1 video processor from Madrigal (parent company of Mark Levinson, Lexicon and Proceed). The projector ...