Integra Premieres NVS-7.7 Media Center
By Geoff Duncan
July 26, 2006
Integra's new Viiv-based NVS-7.7 Integrated Media Center offers a powerful combination of features for custom home video and audio setups.
Although it's really aimed at the custom-installation market rather than your everyday consumer electronics buyers, we'd be a little remiss if we didn't make note of home-theater gizmo maker Intregra's new NVS-7.7 integrated Media Center. The basic idea is that instead of trying to wedge a general-purpose PC into someone's home theater setup—and deal with all the headaches of add-on hardware, driver issues, updates, and maintenance—why not built a special-purpose multimedia PC with media center capabilities and first-class AV capabilities built right in?
The Integra NVS.7.7 is built on Intel's Viiv technology brand and runs Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 on a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 Dual 820 CPU; the system sports 1 GB of memory, 400 GB of storage, and can push audio and video throughout a home, including high-definition WMV, MPEG1/2/4 video, DivX, JPEG images, and music and audio in MP3, WMA, AAC, and PCM formats over 100Base-T Ethernet. The NVS-7.7 works with Integra Net-Tune Clients for streaming audio, and content can be shared with other Windows Media Center platform devices via Ethernet network. Sorry, no Wi-Fi.
Also on board: NTSC and ATSC (and FM!) tuners for viewing (and recording) TV, a front-loading DVD/CD drive supports DVD, DVD +/-R/RW, CD-R/RW, and VCD, an 8-in-1 card reader for loading in media from portable devices like camcorders and cameras, four USB 2.0 ports, one four-pin and two six-pin FireWire ports, and Serial ATA output for adding more hard drive storage. The system can output video to HD-compatible DVI, VGA, and component outputs, along with S-video and composite outputs. On the audio front, the NVS-7.7 sports Wolfson 192kHz/24-bit DACs for high-quality audio, and is the first media server product to support Dolby Master Studio technology for 7.1 surround processing.
"The power, flexibility, all-in-one capabilities, and high storage capacity of media center PCs have made them an essential tool for custom installers," says Integra Marketing and Product Planning Manager Paul Wasek. "However, these systems are first and foremost PCs, with all the attendant configuration and support issues that can add up to a customer service nightmare for small to medium sized installers. Integra's solution to this problem was to design a system that is first and foremost an AV component—it just happens to be built on a PC Platform."
Intrigued? Integra says the units are available right now (with wireless remove and keyboard) for a suggested price of $3,000.