Neko Audio D100 Mk 2 Stereo DAC

Rick Schmidt

DACs are taking over. I've been waiting for this day ever since the CD format came out because DACs provide an upgrade path. Upgrading is fun. And because DACs are cool. The conversion from digital to analog is of course crucial and for electrical engineers holds more than a little fascination as the music is (we hope) recreated from simple ones and zeroes. In this review, we take a look at the Neko Audio Mk 2 stereo DAC.

DACs

Sherwood Newcastle R-972 7.1 A/V Receiver with Trinnov Room Optimizer Technology

Robert Kozel

The Sherwood Newcastle R-972 A/V Receiver is the latest high-end receiver in the Sherwood product lineup. The Newcastle brand is Sherwood's premier product line. The R-972 A/V receiver boasts some impressive features including 7 channels of amplification at 100 watts per channel, 4 HDMI 1.3 inputs, on-board decoding of DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD high-resolution audio formats, XM satellite, and a Silicon Optix Reon video processor supporting upscaling to 1080p. In addition to all this functionality, the R-972 is the first product to offer a consumer version of the Trinnov Room Optimizer technology.

Receivers

NuForce Icon HDP USB DAC

Chris Heinonen

In the past couple of years, the market for DAC's with USB inputs has really taken off. As people move their whole music library over to a music server, and lossless and high resolution downloads of albums starts to become a reality, getting that audio from your PC to your stereo has become increasingly important. NuForce made a splash with their original Icon DAC, which featured a USB DAC, a couple analog inputs, a 12W amp for a stereo speaker setup, and a headphone output. They have come back and improved upon that by releasing the new HDP model.

DACs

Kordz EVO, EVS, and EVX HDMI Cables

John E. Johnson, Jr.

HDMI cables have two basic issues that are somewhat different than with audio cables, namely that they tend to be much longer, and also, the HDMI connector has turned out not to be very robust. So, if the HDMI cable that came with your new HDTV or DVD player is not doing the job for you, Kordz makes cables that will deliver the goods under any conditions. We review here their pure copper model, the EVO, as well as the EVS which has a thin coating of pure silver, and the EVX, which has a thicker coating of silver.

Audio Cables
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QSONIX, WADIA DIGITAL JOIN FORCES

Secrets

FOR WORLDWIDE SALES AND NEW TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT Newbury Park, CA (May 24, 2010) –Leading digital music server developer Qsonix and legendary digital audio c...

Press

Home Theater Movie Renter’s Guide – June, 2010

John E. Johnson, Jr.

The Wolfman (Blu- ray), From Paris with Love (Blu-ray), The Edge (Blu-ray), Marked For Death (Blu-ray), Armageddon (Blu-ray), Do The Right Thing (Blu-ray), Invictus (Blu-ray), Alice in Wonderland (2010) (Blu-ray), Carlito's Way (Blu-ray), Edge of Darkness (Blu-ray), Saving Private Ryan (Blu-ray), Daybreakers (Blu-ray), Robin Hood: Men In Tights (Blu-ray), Tetro (Blu-ray), High Anxiety (Blu-ray), Dirty Dancing (Blu-ray), Elektra (Blu-ray), History of the World- Part 1 (Blu-ray), Wolverine and the X-Men (DVD), Heroes: Season 3 (Blu-ray), Battlestar Galactica- Season 2.0 (Blu-ray), Wizards of Waverly Place: The Movie (DVD), Dune (Blu-ray)

Movie Reviews