This much awaited preamp from one of our favourite companies offers an opportunity for the more ardent amongst us to get into surround separates at a very reasonable price.
Surround preamps have always been sought after but handicapped by the economies of scale, perversly a preamp has tended to be much more expensive than an integrated receiver due to the fact that a surround receiver will always sell an order of magnitude more units.
NAD appear to have made the T175 preamp in their inimitable fashion to a price that corresponds to the economies of scale of the mass market receivers but with the quality of separates.Most unusually for a unit at this price point there are slot in upgrade paths available for future audio formats et al. This is normally associated with $8K plus devices like the Arcam AV9 and the Denon AVCA1.
The idea of a separate preamp for surround is that you can have your stereo HiFi freak cake and eat it as well with superlative home Cinema decoding.
Add a multi channel power amp such as NAD's own T975 and you have a theatre system that will reach into the soul of a performance and substantially protect against technological evolution in the market place.

This is one of the coolest of all the on wall keypad audio systems short of Crestron ... but without that price tag. The Mode keypad from Speakercraft has an illuminated rotary control which combined with a scroll key and an LCD display makes it fab for accessing music collections and radio stations. The system has one of the best iPod integration systems and ... coming soon ... will offer an iPhone wireless integration.

The screens are getting two dimensional, Sharp and Panasonic are in a race to build the slimmest most waif like anorexic televisions.

This is a rather nice Sharp LCM3700 pro monitor LCD TV mounted on a rotary pole in one of Melbourne's better apartments. This particular installation is run by a Crestron control system that enables the client to flick imagery and audio seamlessly beetween the various regions of the residence.

Its always a good sign when you haven't even finished unpacking a product and a customer walks in and buys it. Thats what happened to our first pair of Aktimates, a new active speaker with a distinguished pedigree.