NEW YORK — More products and announcements were made at the Home Entertainment show, held here earlier this month. Here are a few:
- Polk replaced its near-30-year-old logo and introduced 13 products, including two replacement electronics/speaker home theater solutions. The solutions, due in July, add DTS decoding, six-channel analog inputs with bass management, shallow-depth speakers suitable for wall hanging, and a separate delete-option DVD-Video player packaged with universal learning remote. The prices are a suggested $2,599 and $2,999, minus $200 if the DVD player and remote are deleted. The company also introduced its first LSi series of step-up speakers offering better performance than existing Polk models. Four left-right speakers include two bookshelf models priced at $399 and $519 each compared to previous bookshelf prices that topped out at no more than $500/pair, DiComo said. Two towers, at $869 and $1,499, each use such designs as ring radiator tweeters to boost detail and transparency. There’s also a center channel at $579 and a switchable bipolar/ dipolar surround at $469 each.
- Sony introduced two more ES series receivers with six-channel amplifiers, joining a model introduced earlier in the year, for reproducing a matrixed rear-center channel. They also feature 50MHz component-video switching, which this year appears on all new ES receivers for the first time. The receivers are capable of passing through full-bandwidth 1080i and 720p HD video.
- CEA president Gary Shapiro, during a press lunch, announced that first-quarter home-theater sales rose 13 percent at the factory level to $2.67 billion, with DVD sales rising 46 percent and analog projection TV declining 24 percent. Overall CE sales were up 3 percent for the quarter.
