I just ran across an article on DigtalHome.ca [via Engadget HD] singing the praises of Plasma over LCD. Although I agree with most of the points, there are a couple with which I completely disagree. In fact, both of the posts seem to be overly-biased toward plasma, to the point that it is almost misinformation. Here are the points with which I disagree, which are probably major enough to push most people to pick LCD over Plasma.

Screen Glare and Dealing with Ambient Light

Taken from the article:

LCD superior in brighter rooms – simply speaking plasma is glass with white phosphors behind it. The result is that a mirror effect can take place when extremely bright light shines on plasma. This mirror effect can make it more difficult to see the images on the screen under extremely bright situations. This situation often occurs inside a big box retailer’s showroom which can be as much as five times brighter than a typical living room! In your average living room where the ambient light level is much lower there is little need for a “brighter” panel.

In general, plasmas have better pictures than LCD, as long as your viewing environment doesn't make the picture unwatchable. If you windows in your room or light on in your room, the glossy glass front surface of a plasma screen will produce mirror-like reflections that compete with the image being displayed. For birght scenes with a lot of colors, it is distracting. For dark scenes with not so much contrast, it makes a plasma unwatchable.

As for "big box retailers being 5x brighter than a typical living room", this is complete misinformation. Most living rooms have windows and lights; I've never been in a Best Buy, Circuit City, Wal-Mart, Target, or any similar store with outside windows, much less with windows close to the TV display area. In fact, the last Best Buy I visited had panels of dark fabric above the entire TV area to prevent direct glare from the overhead lights. How many living rooms have that?

Cost Comparison

Taken from the article:

Lower cost – this one is self explanatory. Visit your local big box retailer and compare the price of a 50” LCD flat panel or 50” plasma from a major manufacturer and you will find that plasma is less expensive. Why pay more when you don’t need to!

A search of BestBuy.com 50"-59" 1080p panels showed the lowest priced Plasma and LCD being the same at $2999. Of the 6 lowest priced panels, 3 were plasma and 3 were LCD. At 40"-49", there were 34 LCDs on only 1 Plasma, and it wasn't the least expensive. At 58", however, Plasma was less expensive.

Viewing Angle

Taken from the article:

Better viewing angles – when buying LCD televisions’, buyers often encounter the term viewing angle. With LCD televisions, as you move off centre, the contrast levels fall. At a 45 degree angle, contast ratios for an LCD televisions drop 80%. To witness this phenomenon, simply stand in front of an LCD television and slowly move to the side of the room. As you move away from the center the image will appear more washed out because more light is spilling through the plastic shutters. With plasma, the contrast ratio is constant regardless of the viewing angles so the picture looks great regardless of where you are sitting in the room.

This is true for older LCDs, but not with newer panels. I just looked at my Mitsubishi LT-46131 straight-on and at 85 degrees off axis. There was a very slight drop in color accuracy and no noticeable drop in contrast ratio. I fail to see how plasma are greatly superior in this area. If you care about picture quality, sit in front of the screen. But if you do have to sit off-axis, you probably will not notice much, if any, difference for either plasma or LCD.

Conclusion

The recommendations from my previous post stand. If you have windows or a lot of lights in your room, an LCD (almost all have a matte screen finish) is much better than a plasma. Plus, LCDs are generally brighter, giving even more advantage in bright situations. An LCD will give a better picture in bright rooms.

If you have a completely light-controlled room, go for plasma and enjoy the better picture quality that a plasma will yeild in that environment.

Exceptions to this rule: the newest Samsung 71/81 Series LCDs have a glossy glass finish to enhance contrast ratios. Just as with Plasma, this is great for dark rooms and terrible for bright rooms.

Buying Advice: Be sure to turn a display off and evaluate/compare a blank screens for reflections and glare before making a final purchase decision.

As you know, my wife and I just welcomed a little girl into our family. Our families ares hounding us for photos on a daily basis so I set out on a quest to find the best way to share with them our digital photos. Here is what I found.

RAW Image Support

I have a Nikon D40 D-SLR and shoot all of my pictures in RAW (*.NEF) format. I do this because the RAW / NEF format offers much, much more flexibility; you can almost re-shoot the picture if you edit it with the Nikon NX software. Anyway, I was hoping to find a service that supports the uploading of NEF files. I found nothing; I'm going to have convert everything to JPEG before uploading it.

Firefox Support for Multiple Image Uploading

I have little patience for sites s that doesn't support the Firefox browser; it's used by at least 1 out of every 5 users now. By support, I don't mean selecting images 1 at a time and uploading them. I don't want to waste my time on repetitive tasks.

• If you use Flickr.com, there are two great Firefox addons: Fotofox and Firefox Universal Uploader. Both worked flawlessly and allowed tagging and folders/albums. I can understand why Flickr is the most popular photo sharing site.
• I was happy to see that ShutterFly.com offers Picture Upload Assistant browser plug-in for multi-image upload. It crashed Firefox every time I navigated to the Add Photo page, even after I uninstalled it and rebooted. Thanks for nothing.
• ImageStation.com received a great review from PC Magazine. It's a Sony company. It offers no Firefox multi-image uploading. Boo. Hiss.

Windows Picture Upload Software

If browser support is lacking, the second choice is to try Windows-based photo upload software. Shutterfly.com and ImageStation.com both have such offerings.

• Easiest: ImageStation XPRESS is super-simple to use. It offers no editing, only uploading and purchasing of prints. I like it.
• Most Full Featured: Shutterfly Studio offers a bunch of image editing options and also allows uploads and sharing by e-mail. The extra features are great, but it's not as easy to use.

Cost, Quality, Storage, and Print Options

All have the capability to print multiple sizes, ranging from wallet to 20×30 inches. The differences come in printing cost, storage, and online editing.

• Shutterfly.com: $0.19 per 4×6 print, in-store pickup at Target for $0.20, in browser editing of prints (crop, adjust colors, add boarders, etc), unlimited uploads/storage
• ImageStation.com: $0.10 per 4×6 print, in-store pickup a Walgreens and CVS for $0.19, no picture adjustments, unlimited uploads/storage
• Filckr.com: $0.15 per 4×6 print, in-store pickup at Target for $0.20, no picture adjustments, 100 MB/month limit on uploads ($25/year for unlimited uploads), unlimited storage

Quality: PC Magazine said all three were great, but that Image Station prints were the best. Unfortunately, this was also, by far, the slowest and most sluggish of the websites.

Conclusions

All three services offer the ability to share and print photos. Which should you choose? It depends on your situation. Here are my recommendations:

• Flickr is best if you want to share your photos online and are not so worried about printing them. They have, by far, the best online presentation and sharing options. If you and your friends and family are not attached to print photos, this is your best bet.
• Shutterfly is best for people who want to easily edit, share, and print their photos. It has by far the best photo editing, but the price per print is higher and the user interface is more difficult. This is best for people who want to print specific, high quality photos, such as parents who want
• ImageStation.com is best for people who want to easily upload a bunch of photos, share them, and print them as-is. It's quick, easy and cheap. If the grandparents want a bunch of grandkid pictures and you don't care about color adjustments, framing, etc, this is your best option to make them happy.

My final recommendation? Go with Shutterfly. The image editor is easy to use, albums are easy to share, and pictures are easy to print. ImageStation is more quantity than quality and the site is extremely slow. Flickr is awesome if you want to share photos with your friends online in any way imaginable, but it's just not as nice as Shutterfly when you need print pictures.

UPDATE: Sony ImageStation is closing down — so cross them off your list!

Ainsley Elaine Bale was born last Wednesday August 15th at 8:24 PM. Everyone is doing very well. We're back at home now, feeding her every 3 or so hours, changing diapers more often than that, and loving every minute of it.

Today Sonos announced the release of version 2.3 of their software, which adds support for Sirius Internet Radio. I was fortunate enough to participate in an early evaluation and NDA ends today; here are my thoughts on the latest software update. This is a win-win situation for both companies; the Sonos system becomes more attractive to Sirius customers and vice versa.

+

Review of the new Sirius Feature

First of all, I'd like to state that I'm not nor have I even been a subscriber to either XM or Sirius satellite radio. This is really my first long-term experience. I was never interested before because I didn't want to install anything in my vehicles and I didn't want to buy a single room home receiver and run the antenna to a nearby window. The Sonos software upgrade solves that last dilemma; there is no satellite radio antenna to mess with because all content is streamed over your broadband connection. This is similar to the Sirius streaming Internet radio feature available on a PC, but this it gives the simple multi-room listening experience for which Sonos is known.

I've listened to satellite radio in rental cars a few times and found the quality to be much better than FM radio. If I listened closely to music, I thought that I may be able to head some compression artifacts and definitely had problem with reception near underpasses. In my casual listening environment (a.k.a. my kitchen and living room — not my home theater), I noticed neither of these problems. The music sounded great and the connection was flawless.

It's necessary to mention the Sirius content as a part of the review. If you're familiar with Sirius, you're probably know as much about the content as I do. To me, but big advantage is the talk channels (interviews, news, comedy, Howard Stern, etc.) In 2 hours, I found more interesting news, comedy, and interview content than I had in the past 2 years of using my Sonos. The music was the typical genres you'd expect. To be honest, I enjoy my Pandora stations more than anything I found on Sirius.

Conclusion

If you're a Sirius subscriber or if you looking to add a bunch of great talk content to your home, the Sirius upgrade for Sonos can't be beat. It's by far the best way to add satellite radio to your home. The downside is the subscription cost. I'm not sure it's worth the $12.95/month, but I have a few more weeks of my trial subscription to decide. For existing Sirius customers who already own a Sonos or are thinking about adding Sirius to their home, the Sonos/Sirius combination is as good as it gets. But if you're focus is specific songs you can hear whenever you want, the Real Rhapsody subscription is probably a better fit. And and if you just want radio stations enjoy, Pandora is less expensive and customizes better to your individual tastes. The great news is that Sonos gives you all three options; pick which ever is best for you or you can just listen to your music collection and Internet radio and forgo the subscriptions costs all together — the choice is up to you.

Final Thoughts - Why I'm a Sonos Fan

To me, the most impressive aspect of Sonos is not the simplicity of setup, not the breadth of features, and the exceptional hardware and software design, but rather the fact that they try to implement features requested by customers. Case in point, Sirius Streaming Satellite Radio support was requested by a user in the Sonos forum some time ago. It's taken a little while, but Sonos made the request reality. Each software update seems to add support for customer-requested features. Off the top of my head I can name multiple features that started off as customer requests: support for FLAC, WMA, WMA DRM formats, support for the Real Rhaposdy and Pandora music services, and an Alarm Clock feature (click here for software revision history.) Customers ask for it and Sonos delivers. How great is their feature support? My Sonos music system is the only major electronic device I own where I have performed zero modifications. No third party software, no hacks, no work-arounds, nothing. It's that well designed.

Despite being around for years, RSS and Atom web feeds have managed to stay below the mainstream radar; a quick poll of my tech-savvy friends proved this to be the case. This article explains what web feeds are, why you care, and how best to take advantage of them.

What are web feeds? According to Wikipedia:

A web feed is a data format used for serving users frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation.

What's the Benefit?

The benefit to the user is step 3 of the syndicate->subscribe-aggregate chain. Using a web feed reader, you can aggregate all of your favorite sites together on one screen, browse new headlines, and then read the content that interests you most. In my feed reader, I aggregate feeds from 38 different site; I can browse through the entire list of new headlines and read the articles that interest me in less than 30 minutes. If I were to visit each of the 38 sites individually, it would take hours.

What's the Best Web Feed Reader?

I've tried different web feed readers over the years, including: My Yahoo!, News Gator, and the Sage and Wizz RSS News Reader add-ons for Firefox, but none of them every impressed me as being great, with each having their own shortcomings. Then I found Google Reader; it makes all of the others obsolete. It has a clean interface, is fast, is accessible from any computer, highlights new content, is easy to navigate, has a great summary page, uses the terrific Google search algorithms to find the feed you're after, and it's free. Click the thumbnail above to see a screen shot.

How Do I Subscribe to a Feed?

If you're not using Google Reader, the subscription process goes something like this: go to a site, look for an RSS link in the page or an icon () in the location bar (if your bowser is new enough), click on the link/icon, copy the resulting page location (while ignoring the mangle of XML code on the page), and then paste that feed location into your feed reader. Then, you'd be ready to aggregate. But with Google Reader, all you have to do is type the website name into the search box and it takes care of the rest.  That alone, plus the other features listed above, make Google Reader the best way to digest the most information in the least amount of time.

Unfortunately, not all sites include all of their content in their RSS feed. Some of the better sites on the internet, such as Gizmodo, offer advertisement-free summary feeds or ad-supported full feeds. I wish all sites did this. Unfortunately, sites such as AntsMarching.org (feed link), and this other site (feedlink) offer only summary feeds. I find this very frustrating, especially since neither site has advertisements. And then are site like RemoteCentral.com that don't provide any feeds at all. Truth be told, I find myself spending less time on sites with no (or lacking) feeds because, without the feed, there is nothing to pull me in.

In conclusion: if you find yourself going to the same sites/blogs for info updates and news, go to http://reader.google.com, sign-in, and search for the site by name. Most likely, you'll soon be browsing your news in a whole new way.

I'm passing along my good fortune. The good folks at Rocketfish sent me review sample and I'm giving it away to one lucky commenter. Don't know what a Rocketfish Wireless Surround System is? Well, it's a 2-part system that eliminates the need to run wires from your A/V receiver to your rear surround speakers. The system consists of the following:

• the Rocketfish transmitter - connects to the rear channel speaker outputs of your audio/video receiver
• the Rocketfish receiver / amplifier - powers your existing rear surround sound speakers

For any contest to be interesting, there have to be some rules. Here's the deal:

• You must leave a comment on this post saying how and why you need a Rocketfish wireless surround system and how you plan to use it.
• Optional: you can post a link to a picture of your Audio/Video setup (you can upload the picture to Filkr or TinyPic and include the link in your comment)
• The contest will remain open for about 2 weeks or so
• The winner will be chosen at random from the best comments (i.e. I'd rather it go to someone who's going to use it rather than someone who is going to Ebay it)
• Rules are subject to change (I've probably forgotten / overlooked something and I might as well be upfront about something possibly changing)

That's it! Comment away. . .

Rocketfish RF-WHTIB Wireless Speaker Transmitter/Receiver Kit Specifications:

• Transmitter: 6.6 K-ohm impedance at 10V RMS; 16-bit, 48 kHz, 1.465 Mbps signal; 15-20 ms signal delay; 100 foot range; 2.4 GHz transmission frequency
• Receiver: 87 dB Signal-to-Noise ratio; 0.4% total harmonic distortion at 1 KHz, 25 watts x 2 @ 4 ohms; supports 4 ohm to 16 ohm speakers
• MSRP: $99
• Rocketfish Customer Support: 1-800-620-2790
• Review
• Rocketfish.com product page

My long-time friend Bryan recently described me as "a person who will spend a lot of money on some new electronic gadget and then take it apart before he even uses it." He's right; I can't help myself. I want to make everything "better." This has extended into the use WordPress Plugins on my site. I'm always looking to add something new and my plugin count has increased to nearly 40. But the list has grown large and I've started to debate the usefulness of several of them. I then receive an e-mail from a native Dutch speaker by the name of Ilse, who reverse-translated the Global Language Translator plug-in translation. I found out all sorts of interesting facts about myself:

• My sex is not male, but little man (ouch!)
• I really like the television show Lights That Shine on Friday During the Night and that the classifications of NBC smell really bad (a.k.a. their ratings are low)
• My favorite artist is the Band of Matthews of Dave
• And, most alarmingly, I really like young goats but don't have them yet

In case you're as curious about that last one as I was, Ilse was kind enough to  inform me that it was supposed to read kids instead of goats.  Trust me, it is kids, and not goats.

So now that the non-English-speaking world perceives me as a little man who likes young goats and watches smelly television , I think it's time to cut my losses. Global Translator has been uninstalled. I tried it out on the promise of "making the site more accessible to non-English speakers." It is certainly a worthy goal, but I wasn't doing anyone any favors, especially myself.

I've uninstalled several other limited-value plugins over the past few days and hope to trim the list down to below 30. There's nothing worse than upgrading to the latest version of WordPress only to have a long since abandoned plugin break everything. Combating this is the excellent WordPress Plug-in Installer plugin, which makes plugin installation a 20 second vs. 5 minutes process, and the new WordPress Plugins site, which allows publishing, voting, popularity ranking, and comments for all plugins (I've been begging/voting for this for a long time.)  Must. Fight. Urge. To. Tweak.

THX just announced a new specification for home theater: THX Loudless Plus. My initial thought was, "I bet this means yet another new THX equipment specification." Well, yes, it does. The benchmark specification for all future receivers will now be THX Ultra2 Plus and THX Select2 Plus. But this is not a bad thing; this specification addresses a real need in home theater: consistent surround sound levels regardless of the listening volume.

Currently, the best way to reproduce a movie sound track is to calibrate your speakers to a certain reference volume level and make sure the volume knob is always at this position. Unfortunately, if you decrease the volume level, your ears perceive the changes in the different channels differently than the front speakers. Because the 3 front speakers (left, center, front) contain most of the sound information, they appear to become relatively more loud as compared to the surround channels; this is true for teh subwoofer as well. The result is that you lose the surround sound effect.

Even existing receivers that have a Midnight Theater mode do not fully compensate for this. They compress the dynamic range of all speakers by the same amount. In other words, the loud scenes are not as loud and the quite scenes are not as quiet, but the relative volume levels between the channels is not adjusted and the frequency curve is not adjusted, so the surround channels sound quieter than they should. THX Loudness Plus solves this by making two adjustments: 1) applying a volume gain curve to the surround and sub speaker levels, maintaining the proper balance regardless of where the volume knob is set, and 2) applying a frequency correction curve to the high and low surround frequencies to better balance with the main front speakers.

For anyone who wants to enjoy surround sound with the volume turned down (or really at any setting), this is a feature to consider during your next receiver upgrade.

For those of you keeping track of the THX certifications, here is the history:

• THX certification for home theater was launched around 1998
• THX certification became THX Ultra (high power amplifiers required) and THX Select was introduced (lower amplifier power requirements)
• THX Ultra2 and THX Select2 replace the previous Ultra/Select in 2005, adding more surround modes and better 7.1 support
• THX Ultra2 Plus and THX Select2 Plus replace the previous Ultra2/Select2 and add loudness compensation

Here are some quotes from the THX website giving more detail:

THX Multi-channel Spectral Balancing: adjusts frequency response to counter the perceptual loss of low and high frequency sound in all channels. Begins with a flat response at Reference Level, and continually adjusts the response as the user selects lower listening levels. The equalization is applied to all channels in a multi-channel listening environment.

THX Dynamic Ambience Preservation: Surround channel processing preserves the spatial detail that is lost when listening below Reference Level. It automatically shapes the output on surround channels to maintain the perceived balance in the original mix.

[Read more] [Read more]

A few weeks ago, I received a review sample of the RocketFish Universal Wireless Rear Speaker Kit. I've spent quite a bit of time with it; here are my thoughts.

For those of you not familiar with the Rocketfish, it is a new brand that is exclusive BestBuy. The products range from cables to computer accessories to flash cards.

The term "wireless rear speaker kit" is somewhat of a misnomer as it does not include rear speakers, but this is obvious at first glance of the packaging or description. The kit consists of two components: a small transmitter unit that is located at the source audio device and the powered amplifier that is located near the two speakers. The big advantage of this product is that you don't have to run wires between your surround sound receiver and your rear speakers.

The Transmitter

The transmitter is surprisingly small and very easy to connect to any speaker amplifier output. It is primarily intended to be connected to the speaker-level outputs of a surround sound receiver. I, however, decided to instead connect it in parallel to the speaker-level outputs of my Sonos Zone Player. My intent was to run another set of speakers in another room and eliminate the need to purchase an additional Sonos Zone Player.

I used the included speaker wire the connection process was very quick and easy. Any time speakers are connected in parallel, there is a risk that the amplifier can be damaged because the impedance can drop too low, causing the amplifier to create too much current/power (a 4 ohm speaker in parallel with another 4 ohm speaker results in a 2 ohm load on the amplifier, which can cause it to cook itself.) This is not a concern with the Rocketfish system because the transmitter has an impedance of 6.6 K-ohms (in parallel with a 4-ohm speaker, the resulting impedance is 3.998.) I was, however, disappointed that there was no input for an RCA line-level signal to the sender; that would have been easier and potentially a bit superior in sound quality.

The Receiver

Installing the receiver was just as simple. I attached to a pair of Polk RT/FX surround sound speakers in my kitchen, which is 30 feet from the transmitter with one wall in between. The receiver fit very nicely in the corner cabinet, but the remainder of the included speaker wire was much too short for my setup, so grabbed a spool from my spare cables bin and finished installation.

Pairing the Transmitter and the Receiver

Pairing the two could not have been easier. I turned on the transmitter, hit the Connect button on the back, and the red LED indicator started flashing. I then turned on the receiver, hit the connect button on the back, and the red LED on it started flashing. A few seconds later, both lights switched to solid red and the pairing process was complete. I didn't even open the owners manual and I had them connected in less than 30 seconds. That's what I call simple. And I never had to re-pair the two again.

Critical Listening

The PoRT/FX speakers, located on top of the kitchen cabinets, were set to bipolar mode. This setting produces a nice, engulfing ambient sound for the kitchen. The source component (Sonos ZonePlayer 100) was switched on and the results were. . . rather impressive! I was expecting the sound quality to be somewhat compromised but it was full, rich, and as nice as I've ever heard from those speakers. And this was using music as a source, which is much, much more demanding than surround sound content. (Surround sound content has a very compressed dynamic range and is almost always being blended with the sound of the main front speakers.) I dialed-in the volume setting on the Rocketfish receiver and walked between my living room (Infinity RS5 speakers powered by the Sonos ZonePlayer 100) and the kitchen. The two rooms sounded very similar in quality and there was no apparent transmission delay to the Rocketfish receiver.

After spending some time with the system, I did note a few issues. When I leave a component on, I expect it to stay on and I don't want to have to turn it on after I start a movie or switch-on an album. Unfortunately, when the Sonos goes into standby mode, it switches off the amplifier, which in turn causes the Rocketfish transmitter to shut off, and then the Rocketfish receiver shuts off. The transmitter will turn itself back on, but the receiver will not. In short, you'll probably need to familiarized yourself with the location of the power button on the Rocketfish receiver; there is no IR remote to turn it on and it powers-off frequently.

The second problem is that I occasionally hear a pop (once every 30 minutes) from the speakers in the kitchen. At first I thought it was the house / kitchen cabinets creaking, but I later determined it was the Rocketfish system. With the receiver off, there were no more pops. My initial guess was that the pops were being caused by interference between the transmitter and the Sonos on which it was sitting; both send signals at a frequency of 2.4 GHz. Unfortunately, unplugging the Sonos did not eliminate the problem. I was going to try relocating the transmitter to a location a little farther away from the Sonos, but that would make the power button much less accessible. Until I experiment more, I guess I'll have to live with the occasional click and pop.

Final Thoughts

The Rocketfish Wireless Speaker System is very easy to install and it is small an unobtrusive. It provides sound quality that is much better than would be required for any movie surround sound track you'll come across. It even provides great sound quality for full-range music. The power level is more than adequate for surround sound and for background music, but I wouldn't recommend it for the two main front channels in your critical listening room. Unfortunately, as with all wireless gadgets, there is a potential for interference from other devices that operate in the same frequency band; you may have to move the transmitter and/or receiver around a bit to find a interference-free location.

At $99, it's a bargain. Instead of spending hours running wires from one room of my house to the other, I spent about 30 minutes and added music to a second room in my house. Better yet, from a sound quality perspective, you can't even tell that it's wireless (as long as you don't have the problem with the speaker pop that I did.) It's the quickest and most inexpensive way to wirelessly add a pair of speakers to a remote location.

In the end though, it's not a replacement for a Sonos ZonePlayer. I was hoping to use the Rocketfish as an additional Zone, but the frequent pops from the speakers were too distracting and hitting the power button too inconvenient.  A Sonos ZonePlayer is about 4x the cost of the Rocketfish wireless speaker system, but it performs flawlessly and has independent volume and source material control. You get what you pay for, and the Rocketfish wireless speaker system is the best wireless amplifier you're going to find for less than $100, or even $200. However, I'd still recommend you run wires if you can. And I'd recommend not trying to use one of these to avoid the purchase of a Sonos ZonePlayer; I swapped a ZonePlayer into the cabinet where the Rocketfish receiver sat it worked flawlessly over wireless.

Pros

• Very small and unobtrusive transmitter
• Horizontal / vertical / wall mounting options for the Receiver
• Stylish black design with all buttons and controls hidden on the back panel and no visible antennas
• Extremely easy setup
• 16-bit, 48 kHz uncompressed audio quality (better than CD quality)
• Transmitter connects to pretty much any receiver or audio device (speaker-level inputs)
• Integrated power cord storage inside the Receiver
• Cool and efficient amplifier with plenty of power for surround sound material and ambient music

Cons

• Does not come in White color option (may blend into some rooms better)
• When power fails, you have to turn both the transmitter and receiver back on (they don't remember their previous power states)
• No IR input to turn the components on/off
• Operates in a potentially crowded 2.4 GHz frequency band (same as WiF and cordless phones)
• Occasional clicks and pops (transmitter sitting on top of a Sonos Zone Player, which has a WiFi radio; 30 feet distance and a wall between the transmitter and receiver when this happened)
• No RCA line-level inputs on the transmitter
• Does not completely eliminate rear speaker wires (wires between the Rocketfish receiver and rear surround speakers will be visible unless your room has shelving or cabinets that can hide them)

Specifications:

Transmitter: 6.6 K-ohm impedance at 10V RMS; 16-bit, 48 kHz, 1.465 Mbps signal; 15-20 ms signal delay; 100 foot range; 2.4 GHz transmission frequency

Receiver: 87 dB Signal-to-Noise ratio; 0.4% total harmonic distortion at 1 KHz, 25 watts x 2 @ 4 ohms; supports 4 ohm to 16 ohm speakers

MSRP: $99

Rocketfish Customer Support: 1-800-620-2790

I'm not going to write a comprehensive review of the movie, I'm just going to sum it up like this: The Bourne Ultimatum is the best movie of the summer. The plot is smart, the action scenes are intimate and intense, and the time line is ingeniously tied to the previous movie. Casino Royale was the best James Bond movie ever and The Bourne Ultimatum is better.

My entertainment advise for the weekend is to immediately pop The Bourne Supremacy into your DVD player for a 2-hour refresher because you don't want to miss the ties between the two movies. Then head to movie theater and see how the story line is completed and experience the paradigm shift Ultimatum imparts on the final scene of Supremacy; it is very well done.