You've got your new large-screen HDTV set up, and you have plenty of your favorite DVDs waiting to be viewed. Now all you need is the right sound. When you sit down to watch a movie -- or live music concert -- in your own home theater, you want to feel as though you're in a real movie theater. The audio is just as important as the picture quality, which means you should take great care in shopping for the right receiver and speaker pieces. As you shop for audio components for your home theater, first check out "HDTV – A beginner's guide." Then, consider the following points:

The AV receiver
Most average home theater users don’t need to buy separate tuners and amplifiers for the different channels. The easiest and perhaps most cost-effective way to get several pieces all in one package is to go with an audio/video receiver, which lets you plug in most, if not all, of the pieces in your system, including your television. read more »

Digital Video Recorders may very well be the future of television. They offer you unprecedented freedom: You can watch precisely what you'd like, whenever you desire. But options vary, and it's worthwhile to investigate what's available so you can be satisfied with your ultimate selection.

The accompanying chart lists six DVR options—TiVo, Comcast, Verizon FiOS, Dish Network, DirecTV and SnapStream Beyond TV4—and provides information about each company for each category to give you a starting point for comparing options. read more »

Screen Location
It all starts with location. Referring back to an earlier article in this series, we discussed how the number of seats dictates the room dimensions and that room dimensions dictate optimum speaker and listener locations. Once we determine these positions, we know that we want the sound to seem as if it is being created by the picture, rather than coming from in front of, below, above, behind or to the side of it. That said, we want the screen to be located about the same distance from us as the center channel speaker. read more »

It's a pretty safe bet that 2008 will be the year of the smartphone, with many new innovative smartphone options coming to the market this year. Buying a smartphone can be overwhelming - there are a lot of different options, and each phone combines a lot of different features. So before you head out to your local big box electronics store, here are a few things that might make it a little bit easier on you:

Taking It to the Next Level
Features like text messaging, photo capture and sharing have all been doable from simple cell phones for years. But smartphones take those functions up a notch by increasing the quality of the experience, and making these features easier to use. For example, typing out a text message on the full keyboard offered by many smartphones is significantly easier than tapping out a message on a 12-key phone. read more »