There's a growing choice for those looking for budget-buy Blu-ray  hardware - but do you get what you pay for when you snap up a bargain?
Supermarket chain Aldi is the latest vendor to offer cheapo HD disc spinners. The store, whose name is a contraction of 'Albrecht Discount', after the two German brothers who founded it - is best-known for a wide range of budget buys ranging from ale to yoghurt, but if you've been to an Aldi, you'll appreciate how the company's  read more »

Servers just got sexy. No really, they have. The Linksys by Cisco NHM405 Media Hub has got to be the most presentable media savvy server yet made. Beautifully built, it has soft lines, blue lights and is whisper-quiet. While you can squirrel it away in a boot room, I suspect you’ll be tempted to put it somewhere prominent, just to show it off. Priced around £350, it’s in many ways the poster boy of the new NAS generation, and typifies the  read more »

Philips' Cinema 21:9 is a bold attempt to do something new in home entertainment and HCC has got its hands on one a full three weeks before the UK launch date.

But what's the picture like and is it the right time to unleash such a unique proposition? 'The world’s first truly cinematic TV' shows widescreen movies without black bars, but comes at a credit-crunching £4,500 price.  read more »

It’s no exaggeration to say that the £999 DMR-BS850 is the most advanced digital recorder yet sold in the UK; due to go down in AV history as the UK’s first Blu-ray recorder, it sports a 500GB hard drive and twin Freesat HD tuners.

That alone should be enough to grab headlines. But the deck does more. As I slowly, reverentially snooped my way around this review sample, I began to wonder not what it could do, but what it couldn’t.

David Preece, Panasonic’s marketing manager, told me weeks ago that it wasn’t so much a recorder as a media hub. And I think he’s right. The thing is a Cadillac of convergence.  read more »

OK, so you’ve got a regular external hard drive but you want to make it visible over your network, perhaps so that you can access audio and video files in different rooms from various PCs.

Well Lindy has a great little gadget that might just fit the bill. This £50 USB 2.0 over IP server provides an interface between the external drive and your network; simply connect the drive to one end and your network to the other via Ethernet.  read more »

Using a hi-def Blu-ray player to watch YouTube clips is like buying a Bugatti and never going over 40, but that hasn’t deterred Panasonic from providing access to the ubiquitous video site through its latest models, the DMP-BD60 and DMP-BD80.
It comes courtesy of Viera Cast, which headlines the Japanese giant’s latest range and uses the deck’s Profile 2.0 internet connection to deliver targeted sites directly to your living room TV.

But in reality Viera Cast is a mere sideshow. The main attraction remains Blu-ray playback, and both the BD60 and BD80 pack an  read more »

Try and talk to people about NAS devices and servers and their eyes generally glaze over. The subject has as much water-cooler appeal as dog hair. But as we all move from an age of physical media to ephemeral files and downloads, their role in AV is set to skyrocket. Packaged discs just need shelves to keep them on, files are more challenging.

One solution to this media file explosion is to build a home server PC, using the Microsoft Home Server OS or Linux, which was exactly my plan. But then this diminutive (8 x 12.5 x 20cm) box came along and forced me to rethink.   read more »

With the news that Pioneer is to withdraw from the TV market, and discontinue its acclaimed Kuro plasma lineup by march 2010, it's perhaps appropriate to look at the company in a fresh light, as a high-end audio brand.

Despite the fact that Pioneer has been making speakers since 1937, it is not thought of as a high-end speaker maker. yet, it has in its portfolio some of the most exciting speaker designs available.  read more »

The BDP-LX91 is the first Blu-ray player in the fast-expanding Pioneer BD line-up to be granted AIR Studios Monitor certification, implying that it has been tweaked for optimum performance by the golden-eared engineers of that famous London recording studio. If you're looking for a guarantee of sonic quality then this is probably it.

Pioneer has a long-standing relationship with AIR and has used Tim Vine-Lott and his team to fine-tune a number of its AV products of late, with spectacular effect.  read more »

Panasonic is making 37in plasmas even though most of its rivals in this size are LCD panels – and the liquid crystal crew have raised the pixel count to Full HD. Is there room for a 37in HD Ready plasma any more, even at £650?  read more »

When Sony announced its BDV-IT1000 5.1 Blu-ray system at 2008’s European IFA tech expo, it predictably made headlines. Elegant and striking, the kit seemed a perfect mash-up of cutting-edge video tech and contemporary aesthetics.

But while much of the coverage focused on the fact it was a pretty-credible looking Blu-ray entertainment centre, the real story lies in the speaker technology behind the system. To make the BDV-IT1000 possible Sony had to reinvent the audio wheel.  read more »

Audio Pro has long shown an obsession with cool, crisp design, often exploring different textures and colours for their products. Yet this set of loudspeakers is as boxy as old-school Volvos, and as function-breeding-form as Ikea furniture. However, this is not priced like cheap flat pack furniture. The price is definitely in the serious engineering bracket at £1,300.

Audio Pro describes this particular Evo system as a ‘midrange’ option, but that’s only partly true. While the company offers a host of speakers that cost more and less than these, therefore making them mid-priced, in comparison to competitive products, this package is relatively inexpensive.  read more »

I got quite a touch of the vapours about Yamaha’s RX-V3800 earlier this year. At £1,300 it pushed the features envelope to new levels of metaphorical postal stationery and sounded simply stunning.  read more »

Panasonic's latest 65ih plasma, the TH-65VX100E, ships into the UK with an £8000 price ticket. That's a hefty hunk of change by anyone's calculation - and it doesn't even come with built-in tuner or speakers as standard.

But you know what? We've started investigating extending our mortgages already. Credit crunch be damned!  read more »

Pioneer's flagship SC-LX90 was development for four years. Given that the usual turnaround for an AVR is 18 months, it's not difficult to conclude that the end result is not your run-of-the-mill music centre.  read more »