http://www.ecoustics.com/latest/links Latest links, updated every five minutes http://www.ecoustics.com/hemag/reviews/21446 Despite getting a very favorable review a few months ago, the Pioneer BDP-09F was missing one key aspect that was disapointing: no DVD-Audio and SACD support. Thu, 03 Dec 2009 04:14:16 -0500 http://www.ecoustics.com/secrets/cd-players/703 The first thing youll notice about the Emotiva ERC-1 CD player is that it looks great. The faceplate of the player and the remote are brushed aluminum painted black accented with unfinished brushed aluminum at the edges. Nice. When its turned on the buttons on the face of the player light up with blue halos. This player would look right at home next to Macintosh gear. Thu, 15 Oct 2009 04:00:00 -0400 http://www.ecoustics.com/dt/news/20874 Epson is looking to get into consumers living room and game rooms with two new home theater projectors aiming to let folks have big screen experience at a relatively checkbook-friendly price. The company's new Home Cinema 705HD projector supports 720p high-definition video, while the MovieMate 60 offers an all-in-one solution with integrated stereo speakers and a CD/DVD player.Epsons Home Cinema 705HD is a 3LCD projector offering 2,500 lumens of brightnessRead | Permalink | Linking Blogs Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:15:00 -0400 http://news.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/10381/591736.html Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:50:00 -0400 http://www.ecoustics.com/secrets/blu-ray-players/667 The NAD T587 represents NADs first foray into the Blu-ray arena. NAD started big by building the T587 to the Blu-ray Profile 2.0 spec. The T587 can also handle CD and DVD discs among other formats such as DiVX. It is not a universal player and will not spin DVD Audio or SACD discs. Its circuitry is based on the Broadcom decoder. A nice touch is that the player comes with auxiliary feet that closely resemble Vibrapods. This player is reviewed as one of the Imagine Affordable System components. Thu, 03 Sep 2009 04:00:00 -0400 http://ecoustics-cnet.com.com/Pharos_Traveler_GPS_137_smartphone_with_two_digital_cameras_digital_player_GPS_receiver_WCDMA_UMTS_GSM/4505-6452_7-33662301.html?part=ecoustics-cnet While better designed than the Traveler 127, the Pharos Traveler 137 still suffers from performance and navigation issues. Thu, 27 Aug 2009 07:29:00 -0400 http://www.ecoustics.com/secrets/cd-players/662 My wife, who I affectionately refer to as the music Anti-Christ often calls me He without Brains when it comes to purchasing audio gear. Our latest interchange of pleasantries began when I announced that I needed a new CD player in the $1500 to $2000 range. She found one at Costco for considerably less than a hundred bucks and thought I would be very pleased. You just dont get it I said, to which she replied Neither will you. I think she meant it in so many ways. Thu, 06 Aug 2009 04:00:00 -0400 http://news.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/10381/581959.html Fri, 24 Jul 2009 18:05:00 -0400 http://www.ecoustics.com/dt/news/20489 If you've accepted the Blu-ray format as your own personal high-definition savior, you've may have noticed it's tough to intermingle your Blu-ray media with all your existing DVD and CD media—sure, a standalone Blu-ray player will handle all three formats, but if you want to have a massive library of content available at all times—potentially from anywhere in your home—that lone BD player isn't going to cut it. For the true media mavens among us, then, Sony has just introduced two new Blu-ray capable MegaChangers that can handle up to 400 CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs."Think about all those great movie and music discs in your collection," said Sony Electronics home audio and video business VP Chris FawRead | Permalink | Linking Blogs Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:15:00 -0400 http://www.ecoustics.com/dt/look/321 How you improve an alarm clock when adding nature sounds, CD players and extraneous features like Bluetooth capability has already been done? Shape it like a flute and make it control your home theater, of course.That’s the route Bang & Olufsen has taken with the BeoTime, an alarm-clock-cum-remote-control inspired – according to the company’s own PR – by the conflict between night and day in Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. A polished aluminum tube comes topped with three tiny square LCD displays to do the time telling, a pop-out lever in one end to activate and deactivate the disarm, and accelerometers within to fire up the backlight with a nudge at night, or trigger the snooze in the mor...Read | Permalink | Linking Blogs Fri, 17 Jul 2009 03:00:00 -0400 http://www.ecoustics.com/dt/news/20396 Video rental firm Blockbuster might have been late to get into mail-order rentals and online streaming, but the company is certainly trying to give rival Netflix a run for its money: Blockbuster and Samsung have announced that new Samsung HDTVs, home theater systems, and Blu-ray players will be able to access Blockbuster's OnDemand video library via the Internet. Products supporting the service will launch in the fall of 2009 (we're assuming northern hemisphere, here). Owners of selected Samsung Seris 650 LCD and plasma TVs as well as Series 7000 LCD HDTVs and above will be able to get the service via a firmware upgrade; some existing Blu-ray player and home theater systems will also be upgradabRead | Permalink | Linking Blogs Tue, 14 Jul 2009 11:45:00 -0400 http://www.ecoustics.com/ah/reviews/transports/cd-players/marantz-sa-ki-pearl-sacd Marantz's high end offerings have impressed us in the past. The new line gets away from the unique gold styling that so caught our eye for the more traditional black with blue lights that has been adopted by just about everyone. According to Marantz, they have a "silk-black" finish but that may not be enough to have this gear stand out. The SA-KI Pearl SACD Player is a $3,000 unit that can play stereo SACDs, CD, and CD-R/RW and is compatible with CD-DA, MP3, and WMA files. Of course, the unit is completely overbuilt but is it enough to justify the cost? Wed, 01 Jul 2009 04:50:00 -0400 http://www.ecoustics.com/secrets/blu-ray-players/647 There has been a lot of anticipation for OPPO Digital's brand new BDP-83 Blu-ray player. This is in part because OPPO has had an excellent track record for producing top notch affordable DVD players, such as the DV-983H (one of the only players in Secrets's history to score a perfect 100 on Secret's rigorous DVD Benchmark) and in part because the BDP-83 is the first Blu-ray player to hit the market offering the features to make it a truly all-in-one solution media solution for high definition playback. These include the ability to handle SACDs as a bitstream or PCM, and the ability to play DVD-Audio discs. The BDP-83 also decodes Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio internally, giving you the option of using the 7.1 analog pre-outs on the rear panel if you have an older receiver, or use the HDMI output to deliver these high resolution movie soundtracks to your receiver in digital form. Thu, 25 Jun 2009 04:00:00 -0400 http://www.ecoustics.com/ah/reviews/transports/high-definition-dvd-players-hd-dvd-blu-ray/oppo-bdp-83-universal-blu-ray Last year we reviewed the Oppo DV-983H universal DVD player which, while a couple years too late to market, was still an impressive product that redefined the price points for universal players. Now, with the only other universal Blu-ray/DVD player coming in at almost 10x the price, Oppo has finally beat the market and brings a true universal disc player to the home theater market that not only plays Blu-ray discs, but also DVD-Audio, SACD and, of course, DVD videos and CDs. Wed, 03 Jun 2009 01:25:00 -0400 http://news.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/10381/571305.html Sun, 31 May 2009 04:06:00 -0400 http://www.ecoustics.com/secrets/blu-ray-players/636 OPPO's new BDP-83 is their first Blu-ray player, and it is also a universal player, meaning it will play DVD-A and SACD. You can choose to have it output SACD bitstream or have it converted to PCM in the player so that older receivers can decode it. This is a first for universal players. And, of course, it outputs Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio with your choice of using the 7.1 analog pre-outs or HDMI for the digital bitstream. It is the easiest Blu-ray player to set up and use that we have ever tested. Our Blu-ray Benchmark Guru, Adrian Wittenberg, has been working with OPPO to fix all video problems that the prototype had, and the fixes will be made available through firmware updates that you can download from OPPO if you purchase the player (some may already be installed when you receive the player). The BDP-83 is so good, we felt you all would be interested in getting a preview of what's to come, so we put together a video tour of the features (presented by Chris Heinonen), and we tossed in a graph of the HDMI digital bitstream frequency response performance as well. The full review will be published sometime in June. Enjoy! Thu, 28 May 2009 11:38:59 -0400 http://news.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/10381/569377.html Tue, 19 May 2009 11:33:00 -0400 http://www.ecoustics.com/pcw/news/163899 General Electric's micro-holographic storage technology can support 500 gigabytes of storage capacity in a standard DVD-size disc. Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:55:00 -0400 http://reviewed.ecoustics.com/product/LG/32LG40.htm The 32LG40 is the 32-inch option in LG's LG40 series of 720p LCD televisions with integrated DVD players. The TVhas a glossy black bezel with a small, equally-glossy burgundy strip at the bottom and retails for a suggested price of $850. Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:53:00 -0400 http://news.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/10381/562028.html Mon, 06 Apr 2009 11:25:00 -0400 http://news.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/10381/557953.html Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:58:00 -0400 http://news.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/10381/553852.html Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:12:00 -0500 http://news.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/10381/546077.html Thu, 22 Jan 2009 05:22:00 -0500 http://www.ecoustics.com/dt/news/18876 Pioneer has brought a new DVD player to CES. The DV-420V 1080p upconverting DVD player is, they claim, the first to offer MP3 encoding capability.The player has a new song encoding feature that lets users take audio CDs and rip them into MP3 files that can be immediately transferred to a USB flash drive, hard drive or portable music player.The DV-420V has a front panel USB port for playback of DivX Internet video and JPEG photos that can be enjoyed in HD quality on a connected television as well as compatibility for multiple audio (WMA and AAC) and video (WMV) format files.It also incorporates a digital analog converter (DRead | Permalink | Linking Blogs Fri, 09 Jan 2009 09:00:00 -0500 http://www.ecoustics.com/dt/news/18874 Pioneer is showing a new range of car CD players at CES, both entry-level and premium models. At the top of the range are the Pioneer DEH-P7100BT and Premier DEH-P710BT models, which offer hands-free Bluetooth calling, dual USB inputs, iTunes tagging and voice recognition.Some models will also have iPod control, be HD digital radio and satellite radio ready.“We’re packing our new single CD players with innovative features that matter to not only kids but also to a broad range of consumers,&rdqRead | Permalink | Linking Blogs Fri, 09 Jan 2009 07:00:00 -0500