One Box Wonders

Tired of the clutter of components in your home entertainment system? These four products are the multi-purpose tools for extreme home media management. Think of them as the SUVs of consumer electronics. They’re roomy enough to hold a bus-load of media and tough enough to take any demanding task you may throw at them. Drop one of these systems into your living room, and your whole household will thank you for it. Just make sure the family shows up to learn how to use the remote.

Escient Vision

Escient, the pioneer in media servers, has a new vision. This one includes a world in which you store all your music, pictures and DVDs in one place and then access it from anywhere in the house. The Vision Series products include the dual 1-terabyte drive VS-200, shown here, which is a networked media player with RAID backup access to the Rhapsody online music service and allows multiple audio or video to be accessed at the same time in separate rooms. The VS-200 (or dual 500GB VS-100) links up with networked zone players throughout a home. You can even add a VX-600 server to expand your system capacity by 4 more 1-terabyte drives if you have a truly massive media collection. You can browse your music and DVD collection multiple ways, including artist, title, genre, cast or cover art through the company’s new Escient User Interface onscreen guide.

$5,999 (VS-200)

$1,999 (VX1)

www.escient.com

SE2 Labs Integrated Theater Console

The ITC One puts so much stuff into one chassis it’s hard to know where to start. In fact, each one can be customized to the buyer, but the options go something like this: digital video recorder (including HD TiVo, or Comcast, Time Warner, Cox …), DirecTV, Xbox 360, Blu-ray, AMX Netlinx control system, Nintendo Wii, Bryston audio pre-amp, IcePower D-Class audio amplifier, video processor/scaler, iPod dock, remote control and more all under one 18” x 21” x 20” hood and easy to connect to your home theater. A patented cooling system keeps it all from overheating, and an anti-noise/anti-vibration system makes it purr like a kitten. Just connect your speakers and HDTV and invite the neighborhood over to party.

$24,995 and up

www.se2labs.com

Niveus Media Denali

Like the Alaskan peak from which it derives its name, the Denali is expansive, but unlike the park, it’s also expandable. The Denali media server (which runs Microsoft Vista Ultimate Edition) can satisfy your high definition cravings with 1080p output (via HDMI or component) powered by an Nvidia 8 Series GeForce graphics card. Memory options include a 1.5-terabyte Seagate hard drive and 4GBs of DDR2 memory. That drive can hold 200 hours of HDTV recordings, over 200 days of continuous music or 1,000,000 high resolution photos. Its DVR capabilities let you pause, replay and record your favorite programs with a free 14-day on-screen guide. It can include a Blu-ray drive and up to four HDTV tuners including CableCARD. Audio is handled by Intel with support for up to 7.1 surround and all the best audio formats. An Intel Core 2 Duo processor keeps the whole thing humming smoothly.

$8,999 and up

www.niveusmedia.com

Sony Home Entertainment Server

The HES-V1000 puts your vast music collection, digital photo albums and growing high definition Blu-ray disc collection into one attractive tower. The HES (shown here from the top) is a 200-disc Blu-ray/DVD changer with a 500GB hard drive for storing 40,000 songs, 137 hours of video or 20,000 digital photos. It’s even a Blu-ray burner capable of copying content onto a recordable Blu-ray disc. Getting around all that content is easy with Sony’s XrossMediaBar menu system (the same menu used on Sony’s PSP and Playstation 3 game consoles). For sharing your digital photos, the HES includes a couple cool slide show modes that can also run while music is playing. Speaking of music, the system can wirelessly stream audio to other DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance)-compatible products such as the Playstation 3 or a notebook computer. The system can register up to 10 devices with four independent audio streams. If you connect to a new Sony Bravia TV with an HDMI cable then take advantage of the Bravia Theatre Sync (HDMI:CEC) to control both with one remote.

$3,500

www.sony.com

$7,999 (VX-600)

www.escient.com