“It is surprising to me how often the A/V Furniture is at best an afterthought for people.”
First of all there are just about no TV’s still available designed to sit on the floor.
In the days of the big rear projection sets you just rolled the monster into position and you were done with the TV. Not anymore; now the television must be placed on a piece of Furniture, a stand, or even hung on the wall. Now what about all that other stuff that goes with it? You have an A/V …

I’m often asked by customers who visit our showroom why we carry a “limited line” of car audio products and my answer is always the same.
“We continue to offer products from brands that provide a high level of performance, dependability and value.”
Over the past two decades, Ask the Advisors has carried many brands of car audio- from some of the biggest names including

Because of the Holidays and how crazy busy we get around here that time of year we have had no real additions to our blogs for a couple of months now.
Quite surprising to us all is the number of people that have written us and asked us to get going again. It seems that there are a good number of people that actually read and enjoy what we write.
Heck there were even a few people that admitted they learned a few things from us! I cannot tell you how surprised and happy I …

If you’ve managed to keep up with technology, you’ve probably already purchased (or are in the process of purchasing) an iPod or MP3 player. These little music players are a great way to take your music along (and weigh less than the old 5 pound Sony Walkman back in the day, too!) and enable you to store thousands of songs.
The current trend has consumers searching for reliable solutions to interface iPods and MP3 players with existing factory (OEM) car stereo systems, and for the most part, there are good solutions

Integra is the High-End division of Onkyo, and was formed 10 years ago to serve the needs of custom integrators like Ask the Advisors; and you the more demanding client.

Custom Integrators like us had specific an unique product needs, and no one was filling them.

So you are ready to shop for a Home Theater speaker system and you have some questions; probably a lot of them. Hopefully the following information will help.

First, be sure and print out all of the spec sheets on all of the speakers you are thinking of buying. These will make wonderful lining for your birdcage, or make it easy to find packing material the next time you need to ship something fragile someplace. You see most if not virtually all of the specs on a speaker mean little or …

“We’ll take care of everything”.
“It’s all covered, soup to nuts”.
“Your check will be in the mail in no time”.

Familiar terms these days to those of us buying extended service contracts. Clichés which are hurled across the retail store floor with abandon in an effort to get us to fork over as much cash as possible as quickly as possible.  They are thinly disguised efforts to convince us that we need something we usually don’t, at a price that’s far too steep to begin with.
The talking heads push extended warranties at every level, …

So I got the chance to take a Sonos  multiroom music system home with me last week. I decided to run the full gamut and tried the ZP90, ZP120, and even the new S5. Control was handled by a single CR200 and my trusty iPhone. I got tired of hearing how good it was and I totally expected it to suck, but I didn’t want to bash it without firsthand knowledge.
So I brought the system home and unpacked the “Bundle 250” and got started. The first thing I did, and I recommend you do the same, …

TV Specs Demystified: Frame Rates
aka scan rates or refresh rates
1080 – 24P – 60P – 120Hz – 240Hz – 480Hz

So you’re shopping for a new 1080P flat panel TV to update your home theater system and one of the many confusing terms you’re seeing on all of these TVs are 24P, 60P, 120Hz, and 240Hz. And that’s not the end of it. 480Hz is on the immediate horizon and there are a few plasma TVs boasting “600Hz Sub-field drive”.
Well like almost everything else in life, it’s not what you do, it’s how you do it. …

1.) The Soundbar
This is probably the fastest and easiest way to add a surround sound-ish system to your home. Why do I say surround sound-ish? Well because a sound bar does not actually have side or rear speakers, so it is surround-ish. While some units like the Yamaha DSP series attempt to create the sound of additional speakers; they cannot be completely convincing. Other units like the B&W Panorama are designed to provide very good sound quality but really only posses a Left, Center, Right type of configuration; there is no …