I accidentally the whole Drobo!

ZipZoomFly has been shipping the black version for about a week. Got mine a few days ago, and it's fantastic. The battery life is no joke.

Nyko BlueWave Remote/IR receiver for the PS3...works like a f'in champ!

Just another thought, promise it's my last one on this article.

These systems are not built for us (meaning, people who read and comment on blogs like Engadget and such). These systems are built for the people who dont have the time to sit there, configure a NAS, or cluster of NAS devices together to a system, sit around waiting for the comp to rip and compress a DVD or CD, or tinker with all the intricacies of a system like that. They dont know how to do it, and dont care about learining. They're busy being doctors, or lawyers, or sultans, or captains of industry. These are the people who pay somebody to drive them 2 miles to the grocery store. The people who pay other people to clean their house and raise their children because they just dont have the time, or just dont think it's WORTH their time. So when these people sit down for a movie, they dont want to have to boot up a device, switch inputs on their TV, wonder why their "awesome" logitech harmony remote isnt working right now, or why their cable box needs to be rebooted for the umpteenth time. They want their movie to start NOW, and everytime they press that one little button that says "Play." Most of the people on these blogs have no comprehension of what that's like, because we actually LIKE tinkering with our setups. We LIKE solving those problems, or finding some homebrew way to make our Toyota look and feel like a Lambo. Kaleidescape is not for us. B&O is not for us. We like taking hodgepodge systems, where our TV is one manufacturer, our Media Server looks like Johnny 5 with extra wires coming out of it, and our speakers were built in the garage with $500 in materials from Home Depot and can shatter glass because we tuned the tweeter juuuuuust right. That's our thing. Kaleidescape, B&O, those companies exist to give better products and superior lifestyle to the people who are willing to pay for them. The same people who buy $250,000 Bentley's and never even touch the steering wheel. They're not interested in the fact that OMFG this new gadget that came out this past week for $49.99 can TRANSFORM the way you watch the same damn movie you were watching before. They dont care, and dont have the time to do any of that. They're busy thinking about whether or not they should have the $90,000 shower system installed in their maid's room in the summer house on the beach, or whether or not they should revamp their wine cellar that's worth more than the net worth of 15 of us techies combined. They just want it to work, and work well.

It's a lifestyle. And definitely not OUR lifestyle. You cant knock them for paying for the best in life.

Man, my Enter button just wasnt working out on my last posts. My whole point I was trying to make is that you can make a media server/streamer/client in myriad ways, but when it comes down to it, your $200 Popcorn Hour, or $3,000 custom-built PC rig, or any other system you can string together on your dining room table for a handful of benjamins just doesnt come close to what Kaleidescape has to offer in the way of integration, quality, and support.

Sure, you'll pay through the nose for it, but quite frankly just because the majority of people cant afford it, that doesnt mean everyone needs to jump on their back and beat them over the head for producing something that is out of your price range(s). At the end of the day, it's a superior product to whatever else is available, and fills a small, albeit extremely affluent niche in the marketplace. We here on these tech forums are always quick to judge against what we cant afford, whether it be because we're jealous, envious, or somehow convince ourselves that good tech has to be cheap tech. It's the same as anything else. A custom-tailored suit is going to have a better wear, fit and finish than one off the rack, but it'll cost you many times more. That wagyu beef burger will cost you $50, but it'll be an awesome $50, and much better than your $.79 White Castle Slider. You can argue "value" until the cows come home. Better is just that..BETTER. If "less" really IS "more," they would have called it "more" in the first place.

All in all, I think Kaleidescape makes a much better product that anyone else in their category, and I think it's a good value for what it can do. Personally, I cant afford one, but I highly reccomend them to my clients, and they are NEVER disappointed with it. Which is much more than I can say for any Media Center PC-based systems I've done on the cheap. And dont even get me started on MegaChanger-based systems, especially that Sony POS with the 200-disc BD changer. I've buried more MegaChangers in my career than I care to talk about.

Wow, I really didnt make that last comment totally applicable to this particular post, did I? You should all also note that these are replacement players for their regular boxes. The old basic ones are out, they're just filling in the gap until their BluRay boxes come out next year.

And in response to all of you that are such sticklers for specs, specifically all of you claiming that just because it's 1080p it's automatically better than 720p, why dont you go see one of those "overpriced" 768p sets with a great video processor playing a BluRay, and then go look at a cheap 1080p set playing a BluRay. Garbage in, garbage out, yes. But even if it's a steak coming in, it'll still be crap coming out. I'll also venture to guess that you actually believe higher wattage = louder? If so, I saw a guy in a white van in the parking lot at Costco with some wicked audio equipment that he "found."

Wow, you guys really are bitter about not having the cash to buy these things, arent you? First off, NO ONE is going to buy this as a DVD Player. It doesnt even WORK as a stand alone DVD player If you want a DVD player for a single room to hook up to your Kuro that you had a nocturnal emission about, then go get a PS3 (to be fair, I use a PS3 as my single BD solution) and shut up. Now, if you have a huge collection of DVDs and CDs, and want the best way to get those around your house/boat/estate/office, using absolutely ZERO compression in your ripping, in a scalable and fully redundant system, you really only have several companies to go with. One, you can get an Escient VX system for $7000 + $2000 for each player, and hope it doesnt fail on you after 3 months. The other would be a Kaleidescape system. I've sold, installed, and used Kaleidescape for a few years now. There really isnt anything like it. I consider myself to be a very tech-savvy person, and in my own home, because I cant afford a Kaleidescape (or any other systems that try and be like it), I built a Media PC and stream it to the different rooms I have. The only thing I can tell you is that putting a computer-based setup into someone's house is NOT ever an option. No one buying a high end system has the time, patience, and usually not the knowledge to use a Media PC based system. And forget about their families. You're just setting yourself up for failure just by thinking about it. The Kaleidescape may be expensive, but you're paying for complete ease of use, a full RAID-K (It's their version of a striped RAID system) hard drive array that can go up to 14TB per larger server, SEAMLESS integration into AMX, Crestron, or whatever other control system you use, and basically peace of mind. I've sold and installed and had to service countless other systems in my career, be it Niveus, ReQuest, Escient, or (god forbid) a Microsoft Media Center PC, and to tell you the truth the Kaleidescape's fail rate isnt even measureable compared to those others. The Kaleidescape system is the fastest at ripping (15 minutes for an average DVD, 4-5 minutes for the average CD), and the fastest at loading up (avg 2 seconds startup time per DVD, faster for CDs), and any moron can every feature they have. When you click "play movie" on the DVDs, it shoots you RIGHT into the movie, no menus, no previews (unless you click "play disc"). There really isnt anything else like it. Never mind the fact that in the rare occasion a client's player, or one of the server HDDs go down, Kaleidescape CALLS ME the next morning to tell me a replacement is being Fed-Ex'd NEXT DAY to the client's home. That's right. Every night the server uploads a status report to Kaleidescape for hardware monitoring. Tell me your PS3 does THAT. Believe me, I hear all your cries of "Ohhhhhh, it's overpriced." But until you actually use one and see how amazingly they work, you really have no idea what you're talking about. Expensive, yes. But the better things ALWAYS are (yes, I'm well aware that just because something is expensive doesnt mean it's better). I suggest all of you try USING one of these "overpriced" products before you use your Jump To Conclusions Mat and call it as such.

ICEpower is the amplifier house of Bang & Olufsen. Basically, they're purely digital amps, with sound quality akin to a pure class A (analog) amp, like a tube amp. The great part is that they draw much less current than a similar output class AB (think MOSFET) amp, while produceing the same, if not more sustained output power, and are m8uch smaller. Also, because they are so efficient, they also produce much less heat than a class AB amp. So, in essence, you get a much more powerful, smaller, cooler, and battery-friendly amp to put into small devices such as cell phones. More power = better speaker options = better sound from the device. The benefits also extend to home audio. They really hit the nail on the head with these amps, and you can find them in extremely high-end audio equipment like Jeff Rowland amps, B&W subwoofers have them now, and even the Engadget community's favorite pinup company Pioneer put them in their Elite receiver (the big one). You'll see more ICEpower amps in the future in many other brands.

First off, the speakers use DDD driver, which hae been around for a while, read here:
http://www.german-physiks.com/ddd-bendingwave-converter/ddd-driver.html

The point isnt to get "360-degree surroundamasound" out of them, but to get a cleaner sound overall. "Normal" speakers with front-mounted cone drivers also have a 180 degree dispersion, but once you deviate even a few degrees off the front vertical axis, you get distortion, volume drop offs, etc. That's why in most audiophile speakers (or even crappy speakers....and ESPECIALLY in electrostats) you have to toe-in the speakers so the drivers are firing at you in a direct line, 0 degrees off axis to get the best sound. The point of these types of speakers is that you now have a perfect response 360 degrees (or 180 in some of them) off the front axis, and there is no distorted sound bouncing around the room and reaching your ears. All you get is perfect reproduction, no matter where you sit in the room. Think horn tweeters, only better. And dont even THINK about telling me about Bose acoustimass systems and how they're fantastic for listening to music with their direc/reflecting technology...because you're just wrong. and as far as the omni-drectional attempts back in the 70's, that's totally true. But speakers now are VERY different creatures than they were back in the day. No, I dont work for these guys, and no, I have no intention of ever being able to afford them. But it's just like anything else, they're built for balls-out performance and if you dont have the scrilla then you should go back to listening to your ipod. I'm just tired of uninformed people making fun of things because they're out of their price range. I'm sure your $10 digital casio watch keeps better time than a rolex, but c'mon...it's a freakin rolex.