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10 Home A/V Products to Look for this Fall

Sep. 29 – Here’s a hot list (not a holiday list!) of new or upcoming home-entertainment products, technologies, novelties and maybe more than a couple of wannabes. Merry browsing.

1. Vizio VF47XVT LED HDTV ($1,700, available in November): The two hottest HDTV technologies are LED backlighting with local dimming – where reduced brightness in specific areas produces deeper blacks – and wireless connectivity for Internet widgets. All this usually costs closer to $3,000. In November, Vizio turns the pricing scale upside down (again).

2. Samsung HT-BD8200 ($800): The sound bar grows up. This long and lean wall-mountable speaker has a built-in Blu-ray/DVD player, Wi-Fi for streaming Netflix movies or music from your computer, access to the free Internet radio service Pandora and an iPod dock cradle. Connect the bar to your HDTV, and you’re surrounded, virtually, by sound. And for those big-bang soundtracks: a wireless subwoofer.

3. Toshiba BDX2000 Blu-ray Disc player ($250): What’s so special about a $250 disc player? It’s the first from Toshiba, the principal backer of a rival high-definition disc format, HD DVD, that folded in February 2008.

4. Managed Copy: With movies streaming freely over the Internet into homes, the Blu-ray disc is looking dated already. So whaddya gonna do, BD?

Starting next year, probably in the second quarter, Blu-ray discs must include a Managed Copy feature that allows users to make a single HD-resolution digital copy of the movie. It can be stored on a hard drive or memory card or burned onto a recordable Blu-ray disc. A low-rez version also may be loaded onto a portable player, though not an iPod.

But Managed Copy discs need Managed Copy players, which may or may not be available when the first discs arrive.

5. JVC LT-32WX50 LED HDTV ($3,000): This overweight country’s obsession with ultra-thin televisions will find this HDTV barely visible, and barely resistible, from the side: It’s only a quarter-inch at its slimmest. Rejoice!

6. H-Pas Speaker Technology: Feel the thunder? Philip Clements of Solus/Clements Loudspeakers has combined multiple traditional loudspeaker design concepts into a single technology that duplicates bass output associated with speakers twice the size.

Solus/Clements, which will market and license H-Pas with another speaker company, Atlantic Technology, showed a prototype speaker at the recent CEDIA Expo in Atlanta that produced bass to about 30 hertz from a pair of 4 1/2 -inch drivers mounted in an enclosure 40 inches tall, less than 8 inches wide and 11 deep. Ordinarily, such extended bass would come from drivers almost twice as big or from a powered subwoofer, a bass-only speaker.

If this newly efficient bass doesn’t deleteriously alter the speaker’s mid-range and higher frequencies, H-Pass could revolutionize speakers, from home theater to desktop.