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1.48 MHz?, 256-bit? Wow! I can't believe you can hear anything through the distortion and aliasing at that rate!

I sample with at least 2.4GHz and 2048-bit accuracy. And maybe, just maybe, I can get a basic approximation to what I get from my 1928 Victrola. Now, maybe that lack of sound quality is because I'm only using Monster cables for my monitors right now. The good news is that I'm on a waiting list to sell a kidney so I can get these - a bargain at $21K for 3 meters! But I have to believe that the sample rate has something to do with it, too.

While iPod sure was better than the most MP3 players, I disagree that iPod was something revolutionary. Walkman players were damn good too, and they weren't as large as iPod - a really important aspect if you want to take some music with you while jogging (so that the player doesn't weight in your pocket, and so that it doesn't either pull your earplugs out of year head). One of the Walkmans that was maybe 1cm wide and 3cm long and ultra light was perfect for this.

Another aspect to think about iPod vs Walkman or other MP3 players was that iPod had no physical feedback on controls. Only flat buttons in front of it. The other players had song scrolls that were out of the player and you could feel them - another important point when you're just putting your hand in pocket and want to change a song.

The sad, sad thing about this is the truth of it all. I have the first gen Sony Minidisc player/recorder that connected via usb and let you put MP3s onto the minidiscs (the MZ-N1, shown there in it's dock). The form factor and design of the hardware was beautiful, the remote was fantastic to use and to show off, and the player fit in my bag while the remote clipped to my bag's strap. Watching iPod users dig out their players and hold the (seemingly) giant rectangle in front of their face for a couple minutes to pick new music seemed ridiculous at the time. The MZ-N1 didn't have the song capacity the iPod did, but I enjoyed selecting music to put on discs, and decorating them. Combined with the optical input and ease of recording (just run a line from the soundboard directly into the player and hit record during a set), I loved it.

It's buried around the house somewhere now, and I still love it, even as I use my ridiculous giant triangle iPod instead. What sold me on the iPod was not it's hardware, but it's software. iTunes (pre-store of any kind), was a breeze to use. Sony used SonicStage, and the MZ-N1 didn't really play MP3s, it used ATRAC3. SonicStage converted MP3s to ATRAC3, then transferred the music to the device. I didn't mind this, as far as I was concerned they were both just compression formats. What made it so sad, was how terrible SonicStage really was. From just looking at it, to waiting to see if the files converted and uploaded successfully or your computer had crashed horribly in the attempt (one couldn't tell because the conversion and transfer often resembled a horrible crash until it was done), that program was always by far the worst software I'd have on my computer at any time. IIRC, there was even a limit to how many times you could transfer a song to a minidisc (thanks for that, Sony's record label branch).

It got to the point where I began to favor the minidiscs that already had music on them, and the more I stayed away from making new playlists, the concept of an iPod started to seem more and more useful. It never seemed to be more attractive, physically, or more functional in terms of listening to music on the go. What it did have was a fair amount of storage on the device and software that really nailed the concept of keeping a digital library, and transferring songs from the library to a device. Apple ended up selling me on an iPod despite its design and implementation as an actual portable music player, simply because the really great portable music players at the time were backed with such crappy software and silly restrictions.

Take an expensive Sanyo projector with DVI in, an expensive Denon DVD player with DVI out, and what do you get? A waste of $20,000.

Some HDCP issue is preventing the devices from working together. Six months later there are some unhappy people, not least of whom are the vendors who still hasn't been paid.

Although your idea is a bit more practical with products like this floating around.

um blu-ray is already here.

no one's gonna get screwed because CDR drives are still flying off the shelves even with DVDR drives as around 150-200$ now.

it's already taken several years for DVD to catch on and quite some time longer for DVDR. at least 5 years for a new format to really catch on and most people don't even keep computers that long anymore.

Sony already has a shipping blu-ray unit. Granted, it's only available in Japan, but thta's what your local neighborhood import shop is for... This is just a list of specs and pictures... Check out all those inputs!

Here's something I caught from this...

Today, major studio DVDs are 480p. They're also around 7GB, and store movies about 2 hours long.

Assuming my math isn't flawed and that webpage is correct... why does Sony's BluRay recorder only save 4 hours of 480p with 23GB of space to play with? Shouldn't it be able to record around 6 hours of 480p with 23GB?

Furthermore, MPEG-2 is pure crap compared to a nicely encoded MPEG-4 movie. Why they'd revamp the media but stick with a bad codec is strange, is it not?

On top of all that, real blow is the fact that this can't even record more than an hour of 1080i, or so it seems.

OK, here are a few: Home Cinema Heaven/Upgrade Heaven, Link Online, AV Land, all of which have much better reps on uk.media.dvd than Techtronics.

Techtronics' problems mostly come from their after-sales customer service, as far as I can see - never dealt with them myself, but seen far too many horror stories on umd. YMMV.