This past year saw plenty of seismic changes in the consumer electronics industry. Televisions added a third dimension. Internet movie and music streaming moved into TVs, Blu-ray players, and A/V receivers at nearly every price tier. The iPad arrived as an A/V powerhouse out of the box, with loads of uses not just for personal entertainment but also for whole-house system control.
Mirroring these changes are the products you see here, which were culled from a list of nominees submitted to Sound+Vision by our valued posse of contributing technical editors.
There are 3D TVs, of course, along with Blu-ray players and media servers that do everything short of making your viewing/listening decisions for you. But just as intriguing are several new takes on that old standby product category, the loudspeaker. You'll find an on-wall model with a mere 1 1/2-inch-thick enclosure that delivers incredibly dynamic performance, a tower speaker that seems to defy physics by putting out deeper bass than its slender cabinet and smallish drivers have any right to, and another tower that simply sounds better than a $2,500/pair speaker has any right to.
All of this goes to demonstrate that with each passing year, every corner of the A/V world manages to do its part in the push toward making the world a better-looking and better-sounding place. —Al Griffin
