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overkill posts

Electronic House picks Home of the Year 2008 winners, we drool


Here it is: the hotly anticipated list of best homes as selected by Electronic House. Interestingly enough, this year's winners are quite different than the champs of 2007, and we suspect all that talk of green these days has something to do with it. Yep, for the first time ever, an "energy-efficient, sustainable" home snagged the highly-coveted gold, but make no mistake, this domicile is packed to the gills with electronic goodness (some of which actually helps keep energy waste down). Even if that doesn't pique your interest, EH has selected a plethora of other swank abodes to highlight, including the best home theater, a pimped out yacht and cribs with hidden treasures. Go on, get lost in the pages upon pages of snapshots and descriptions below -- and feel free to brag in comments if your pad wound up a winner.

SnapStream Enterprise TV Server: ten tuners, 8TB of storage


And you thought WeaKnees' 2TB TiVo was hot stuff, now didn't you? Be that as it may, there's no denying that this beast puts the aforementioned DVR to shame, as the SnapStream Enterprise TV Server is available with up to ten built-in tuners and 8TB of fault tolerant storage space. In case you couldn't surmise, these units were created for enterprise use, but that's not to say it wouldn't fit right into your abode. In addition to being mighty impressive from a hardware standpoint, the software aspect is pretty svelte, too. The search feature enables users to snoop around within program meta data, and moreover, it enables owners to easily burn content to DVD, extract clips from full recordings and convert files into a variety of formats. Sure, even the "low-end" version rings up at $6,000, but if your New Year's resolution is to remain firmly planted on a sofa until 2009 (or beyond), this would probably be a sound investment.

[Via TVSnob]

PS Audio's prototype CD transport pretends to be cool


There's nothing we love more (okay, that's an exaggeration -- but barely) than blatant overkill, and this here prototype from PS Audio fits that description to a T. Granted, we fully expect audiophiles to blindly stand up for this thing -- even though no one outside of the company has a clue just how incredible (or not) the innards actually are -- but here's the skinny. This not-yet-named CD transport reportedly transfers audio tracks from standard CDs onto internal memory for as long as the disc remains inside; apparently, this design "nullifies any jitter" and "other possible audio degradation." Theoretically sound as this logic may be, we can think of quite a few other ways to listen to music stored on flash memory (or similar) without spending $2,000. Who knows though, maybe that wood is incomprehensibly exotic.




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