What do you guys think of the new Media Systems?

[Kevin Haskins]

I was really impressed with the features some of these are bringing to the market. It seems like if they get the price down these could eventually replace a lot of our equipment. The usability was very good.... I have to say I didn't think they could get it right until several generations but the HP unit is pretty cool at CES.

If your not familiar with them check out the HP z545.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1734407,00.asp

[TimRawson]

Check out the towers of power forum here at HTGuide. There's a lot of activity going on in the HTPC world...

Being a former pc junkie, slapped a machine together for about 600 bucks. Decided to do that rather than spend it on a 'giant killer' cd player (like music hall, rotel 1072 or used rega). The dac's in my prepro sound pretty good and figure I can get bit perfect steam out of a pc then have all my audio archived to boot and threw in some dvd archiving for instant access to kid videos.... Haven't done any extensive ab'ing to see if I can hear differences (but then again, don't have great source player to compare to).... would like to borrow a broken in music hall player from fav local dealer to see and appease the equipment junkie-itis to rest.