Rebecca Day

High-end audio company Bryston is using CEDIA as a launch pad for a new class of digital music player targeting the small but underserved computer audiophile population. Bryston Vice President James Tanner told Consumer Electronics Daily that a growing supply of high-quality 176/24 and 192/24 digital downloads from audiophile music labels is creating a market for playback equipment that can handle hi-res digital audio.

Nuage Nine, named after the French word for cloud, is one of several start-up IT companies heading to CEDIA next week with a new cloud-based automated monitoring system for home entertainment and control systems. CEO Vaughn Petraglia told Consumer Electronics Daily that the transition to digital systems based on software and firmware has created a need for residential maintenance systems akin to those protecting corporate IT systems.

Consumers looking for D-Link’s DSM-380 Boxee Box HD media player Monday at exclusive distributor Amazon were directed instead to a page listing Roku HD, Roku HD-XR and Apple TV media players. D-Link said in a news release that Amazon would begin taking pre-orders Monday for the streaming box that’s slated to ship to consumers in November for a street price of $199. When we checked Amazon, Boxee Box came up under “related searches” beneath the Roku products. Clicks on Boxee were re-directed to a D-Link page with a router instead, with the message “your search for ‘D-Link boxee box’ did not match any products.” A D-Link spokeswoman cited “minor technical issues” and gave us the link to a special URL, www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0038JE07O, which she encouraged us to give to our readers. It wasn’t clear how consumers looking for the product would find the special URL. D-Link announced the launch of Boxee, an HD media player built on Intel’s Atom CE4100 SoC, at the Intel Developer Forum being held this week in San Francisco. The chip is said to provide the processing power, audio, video and graphics capability required for Internet-driven applications, multimedia, advanced user interfaces and electronic program guides. The box enables support for 1080p content, regardless of source, the company said. According to D-Link, Boxee offers users access to 80,000 TV episodes and movies online, access to Flickr, Facebook, Pandora and YouTube, along with other apps.

Bluetooth-based 3D TVs and glasses will hit the market by year-end, relieving some of the viewing angle and interference problems that have marred first-generation 3D TV viewing, a Broadcom executive told us. Jim Muth, marketing director in Broadcom’s embedded Bluetooth products group, said two or three manufacturers will ship Bluetooth-enabled 3D TVs this year, but he wouldn’t elaborate.

"Why rebuild an entire showroom and then close the doors?” read a recent post from a fan on Absolute Sound’s Facebook page after the Winter Park, Fla.-based specialty AV store went out of business in early August. The once-prominent specialty AV dealer was celebrating its 31st year in business, having weathered transitions from two-channel audio to home theater, from multi-room audio to whole-house custom electronics. In the end, owner Charles O'Meara said, a “perfect storm” of adverse business conditions and misfortune caused the company to shut down operations just a month after completing a $900,000 showroom renovation, leaving him to shutter operations of his retail and custom businesses when he couldn’t make the payroll.

While much of the custom market is heading to CEDIA Expo this month with iPad apps to integrate with the Apple ecosystem, Universal Remote Control is shifting gears and launching its Total Control whole-house control system with 14 new products. The IP-based system is said to manage lighting control, energy monitoring through the TED 5000 (The Energy Detective), multiple zones of audio and networked surveillance cameras, regardless of protocol.

A two-store survey of 3D U.S. Open action Saturday in northern New Jersey revealed polar opposites in retail awareness of the technology. We stepped into a Sony Style store at the Garden State Mall in Paramus mid-afternoon, looking for U.S. Open action broadcast by CBS Sports over DirecTV. The 55-inch Sony 3D TV on display was showing the same stock footage as other HDTVs in the store. The 3D World Created by Sony section was empty, so we asked a saleswoman to put on the U.S. Open. After saying, “I didn’t know it was on,” she brought up ESPN and we directed her to the DirecTV n3D channel instead.

XpanD’s line of universal 3D glasses launched at IFA last week are said to work with all 3D TVs and in certain U.S. theaters that use active 3D systems. The $129 glasses will be in stores worldwide by the end of October, said a company spokesman. XpanD positions the glasses as a universal solution -- working with both TVs and at the cinema -- compared with the active-shutter universal glasses Monster Cable introduced last summer that come with their own transmitter ($249 for one pair of glasses and transmitter) and work just with 3D TVs.

Orb Networks began shipping a low-cost multi-room music system that leverages consumers’ existing investments in smartphones and wireless home networks. Orb’s $79 solution, available direct to consumers from the company website, combines a $69 receiver resembling a thin, lightweight hockey puck, a $10 iPhone/iPad app for remote control capability, a set of audio cables and a power cord. Each additional room requires a $69 receiver that can plug into stereo systems, TVs, tabletop radios and other music systems using standard RCA plugs, the company said. A version for the Android smartphone platform is due later this month, CEO Joe Costello told Consumer Electronics Daily. The system operates over 802.11b/g/n networks.

CBS is testing a new camera setup devised by Avatar director of photography Vince Pace this weekend during 3D production of the U.S. Open, CBS Sports executive vice president Ken Aagaard told journalists at a Panasonic press conference Wednesday. Due to the limited camera positions available in the tennis stadium, compared with those of baseball, basketball and football venues, the company had to find a way to combine cameras into a single rig manned by one person, he said. Pace’s solution was a “shadow” camera system, that straps two 3D cameras to a special housing at the top of the lens of the 2D camera, Aagaard told Consumer Electronics Daily.