The best gear of the year, as picked by the editors of Home Entertainment.

Premium Blend

The NaimUniti combines all your stereo favorites in to one unifying package.

Mix together one part amp and one part DAC and you get Hegel's H100 Integrated Amp.

I am loving the influx of high-end audio gear that plays nice with computers.

It's taken long enough, but it seems like the audiophile companies are embracing computer-based digital audio for the future that it is.
    
Whch brings us to this, the Hegel H100 Integrated Amp.

When Digital Met Analog

Ditch the transistors and go tubing with old-fashioned, oh-so-analog vacuum tube audio gear from Peachtree Audio and Fatman.

Wall of Sound: Three new surround formats from Audyssey, Dolby and DTS aim to bring your theater sound to a whole new dimension. Literally.

You want me to buy more speakers? Yeah, I get that. To be honest, that was my first thought when I heard about height speakers. Just a gimmick, right?

Well, to find out, I journeyed up and down the California coast visiting the headquarters of the formats’ creators.

The Light Fantastic

“See me, touch me, hear me!” Those would be the Solista MkII's first words, if it could talk.

The amplifier's flowing lines and voluptuous shape couldn't be from anywhere but Italy. And it is, entirely hand-crafted in Vicenza. The chassis' undulating curves and exquisitely machined knobs show this is no ordinary high-end amplifier. Listen to your favorite tunes and it becomes clear the Solista MkII was designed to preserve, above all else, the essence of the music.

Silver Sounds

Well, it looks huge. Maybe not huge, but certainly hefty.

And yet at 38 pounds, it’s not.

There must be some kind of magic in there doing something.

One receiver to rule them all

The consumer who is looking for one receiver to deliver stellar audio from their iPod and Internet radio stations, while also featuring HD radio need look no further.

Yamaha has risen to the demanding challenge of designing one integrated receiver that combines all of those elements and even more with the RX-V3900 7.1 Home Theater receiver.

Ultimate Hybrid

One of the fastest-growing product categories is high-end audio devices that decode digital audio from a computer or iPod.

This amuses me, as for years many in the high-end audio realm thought of the iPod somewhere above the Anti-Christ but just below one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Not sure which, maybe the green one.

The Crestron Experience Center in Las Vegas is one of the few places in the world delivering hands-on demos of the wonders of home automation.

With its new Las Vegas Experience Center, Crestron—which in home automation is perhaps even more pervasive than Microsoft is in the computer business—seeks to make its creations more accessible to dealers and customers. The Experience Center is one of only a few places in the world where one can witness home automation at work.