Ian Morris

Yamaha HTY

If you long for the auditory joy of surround sound, but don’t want — or aren’t allowed to have — a multi-speaker setup at home, then you’ll relish the opportunity the Yamaha HTY-750 provides: surround sound in one compact box. The HTY-750 scores over some of Yamaha’s larger sound bars in two main ways. Firstly, …

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TVs, DVD recorders and hi

I’d like to direct my right honourable friend to the recent news that MPs are entitled to claim back up to £23,000 a year in expenses to help them furnish their London bolt-holes. That’s right, your local MP is entitled to claim back more every year than the average British salary, just for kitting out a second home. This is …

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Onkyo LS

You look over at your TV and you feel a little twinge of joy. It’s beautiful and you’re proud of yourself for choosing (and paying for) such a divine piece of technology. You switch it on and marvel at the glorious high- definition picture and once again, you give thanks for your genius at selecting such a high-quality piece of …

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Jamo DMR 70: Build your own home cinema

One of the problems with traditional all-in-one-box home cinema systems is that you’re stuck with the speaker setup the manufacturer decides on. The Jamo DMR 70 lets you customise your system by offering a number of different options, for a wide range of prices — but keeping the convenience of the all-in-one. At the heart of the system is a …

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Steve Jobs is right, Apple TV is a failure

There have been some reports in the press recently that Steve Jobs considers Apple TV to have been something of a failure. I say he’s totally correct. Apple TV, shown here in the middle of an epic, epic fail Despite its current high level of fail, there are many promising aspects to Apple TV that give me some hope for the …

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Denon AVP/POA

If we hadn’t just ruined it in the title, we could make a snappy joke out of the Denon AVP/POA-A1HD. “What has two boxes, takes two people to lift and costs as much as a car?” But the AVP/POA-A1HD is no joke — it’s Denon‘s outrageously high-end home cinema system and we really want one. The A1HD comes in two …

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Sony BDP

If Blu-ray is to justify the effort of winning a format war, it has to get better at persuading customers to part with their cash. The best way to do that is to show them how much they’re missing when they watch movies on DVD, and interactivity is a key part of that. Enter the Sony BDP-S350 and BDP-S550, players …

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Panasonic DMP

The Panasonic DMP-BD30 Blu-ray player we checked out recently was terribly exciting, but we’re even keener on the company’s DMP-BD50, which adds one important feature to the Blu-ray arsenal — BD Live. This means that the BD50 — or ‘Fiddy’ as we’ve decided to call it — is basically a profile 2.0 player, making it one of the few announced …

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Blu

Imagine (pun intended) there’s a race. In one lane is the late, great John Lennon. In the other, James Blunt. The starting gun fires, and somehow Lennon, who has been dead for 27 years now, beats Blunt to the finish line. Well, that’s exactly what’s happened with HD DVD. The dead format has managed to rise from the grave and …

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Hitachi 32MH70, 37MX70, 42MX70: Seriously thin LCD TVs

It’s easy to promise you’ll make the thinnest TV in the world, but actually doing it is quite another thing. When it comes to ponying up the goods, Hitachi has beaten the likes of Samsung and Panasonic to produce an impressively thin TV. The range, which is hilariously known as Wooo in Japan, is due to touch down in Britain …

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