Sony BDV-HZ970W 3D Blu-ray Home Theater System, 1000 Watts, Wireless S-AIR Surround Speakers, Desktop Stands, Black

Imagine getting a true 5.1 channel home theater system with the speakers and an A/V receiver with Blu-ray player included. You're imagining the Sony BDV-HZ970W 5.1 Channel Home Theater System. But this is no figment of your imagination. It's real, it's here and you can get yours at a surprisingly affordable price.

The BDV-HZ970W is a full 1,000 watt 5.1 channel "home theater in a box." The five speakers include the front left and right speakers, the surround left and right speakers (for that immersive feeling) and the center speaker (which helps keep the dialogue loud and clear). The "point one" is the subwoofer, which pumps out the deep bass that helps make adventure movies and console games so much fun.

If you're not looking forward to running wires through your living room you'll love the fact that the surround speakers are connected to the main unit wirelessly using Sony's S-AIR technology. You can also send audio to up to 10 rooms from a single BDV-HZ970W. Just add optional Sony S-AIR receiver/speaker systems in each room. It's great for parties when you want to pipe the music throughout the house.

The BDV-HZ970W is x.v.Color compatible, which means it can pass more than a billion colors from its Blu-ray player to your compatible HDTV. That's actually more than the human eye can discern but it's not some kind of marketing gimmick. It smoothes out banding that can occur even in HD signals. You can't get a more vivid and lifelike picture.

Since no two home listening environments are the same your BDV-HZ970W is programmed to "know" how it's supposed to sound in an ideal listening venue. You plug in the included calibration microphone and place it at your listening position. Then you simply use the on-screen menu to start the auto-calibration check. In half a minute or so of beeping from each speaker your BDV-HZ970W will "know" how to adjust its sound output to match your room acoustics and it will save the information in its memory.

If you add or subtract some furniture or move your unit to another room you can repeat the test and store the new results. Who would have expected such sophisticated technology from such an affordable system? The BDV-HZ970W is compatible with 3D discs and other 3D programming. (You'll need a compatible HDTV, 3D glasses and something to watch, like any of the burgeoning supply of 3D movies on the market.

Have you heard about DLNA yet? The Digital Living Network Alliance is an industry group promoting a standard way for compatible devices to share content on a home network. If you're picky about film audio the BDV-HZ970W was made for you. It's got more than a dozen surround sound codecs from Dolby and DTS. You'll have a blast auditioning all of them.

To make getting on the Net as easy as possible your BDV-HZ970W has Wi-Fi capability so you can use a wireless router attached to your broadband connection and it also includes 1 GB of built-in memory, which is required for local storage of downloaded content.