By William Van Winkle		  
 
AS I WRITE THIS, IT’S STILL A pinch before Christmas, and my two little boys, ages six and three, are yammering for their voice-controlled Sharper Image R2-D2 robot and Rock Band for Xbox 360. The thing I never thought would happen has come to pass: I can’t wait for them to open the presents, because I want to play with them. Toys! When was the last time I got excited about playing with toys? There’s a signpost under the tree. We’re done with Thomas the Train and now crossing over into...The Cool Tech Zone.

Admittedly, I was a raving Star Wars nut throughout my childhood. And once upon a time, I fancied myself a fair guitar player—-for a hack. Maybe I’m projecting here. (I mean psychologically, not with the $2,000 R2-D2 LCD projector and Millennium Falcon remote control.) But the lesson I learned this holiday season is that we never stop loving our toys. We just need the time and a good excuse to get and play with them.

Another lesson that popped out of this season for me came as I was mulling over some reading from Christmases past, one of which was work by the famed and late mythologist Joseph Campbell, who detailed the symbolic role of the tree through the ages. In flipping through his work, I came across one of his lectures that expounded on one of his favorite themes: follow your bliss. Well, that seemed appropriate for the holidays. In a time too often riddled by stress and financial crunch, sometimes it’s good to just pause and reflect on the things that make us happy, the things we should be pursuing as we head into a new year. Follow your bliss, said Campbell, and you’ll find success and inner satisfaction.

A few months ago, Reseller Advocate ran a cover story on media center technologies for 2008 and ended with a promise to return with more on the subject. In that piece, I detailed my sense that HD media was the central driver of the HTPC market, and the more resellers could target HD consumption via the PC, the better off they’d be. But a lot of material was left on the editing floor, and I’ve been looking for a pattern to it. Finally, I see a connection. Toys and bliss.

We geeks are merely high-end toy consumers on the other side of the counter. People just like ourselves come through our shops all the time. We spend time selling customers on the virtues of home theater PCs—-and they are many-—but what do we do to optimize the experience? If it was our money, wouldn’t we want the coolest toys our money could afford? Wouldn’t we strive for that extra level of fun and bliss?

Here’s an example. Ever heard of a USB-DAC? Until recently, I hadn’t, probably because I’m a PC guy, not an audio guy. These are little boxes that take digital audio input from computers (usually by USB but sometimes also S/PDIF) and convert it into analog for output to an amplifier. Why not use a sound card? Because a USB-DAC is built solely for this purpose, so the results are generally a quantum leap better. Check out the USBTD from Scott Dixon (http://scott-dixon.com/dac.htm). This bit of deliciousness converts digital PC audio into an I2S signal-—the native format for DACs rather than thejitter-prone S/PDIF—-and cycles it through a 12ax7 vacuum tube before passing it on to the RCA stereo jacks.

Pros will tell you that tube-based amps, much like LP players, provide a warmer, fuller sound. I’ve tried a couple of gimmicky PC products with vacuum tubes, and the results weren’t encouraging. This is different. Dixon has been doing niche products like this for over 20 years, and his products are very well-reviewed in audiophile mags. The USBTD is supposed to provide the best audio available this side of a studio-quality turntable. At $475 a pop, this isn’t for people who think Verizon’s music service is just too cool. This is for the people who don’t blink when dropping $2,500 for an HTPC to accompany their 63-inch plasmas or projection systems. You know you want one. I bet you could sell one too.

All right. I know what you’re thinking. “I can count the number of $2,500 HTPCs I sold this month on...” True enough. Honestly, I’m of the mind that HTPCs will remain a niche affair for the near term and perhaps even die off once TVs grow high-speed LAN adapters. (Hey, it’ll happen. HP already packs a digital media adapter into the 42” or 47” MediaSmart LCD HDTV.) But the fact is that, for now, you don’t want to pick sides. The best media center products are ones that excite and incite regardless of the user’s entertainment topology.

With this agnosticism in mind, I have a Microsoft double-play for you. The first is Microsoft Windows Home Server. This OS is based on Windows Server 2003 R2 and is slanted at the now 50% of U.S. households with multiple PCs. With multiple PCs come the challenges of managing a LAN and the data spread across it, some if not most of which is going to be multimedia. Home Server puts a nearly noob-proof GUI in front of a ton of invisible power and management. Home Server handles backup for all LAN clients, shares folders, provides remote access (much like Remote Desktop, only better), and acts as a media repository and server. You can install Home Server on any Windows-compatible PC platform. Just don’t presume that it replaces the HTPC because it doesn’t. It’s more like a LAN storage platform on steroids. By keeping a family’s media content on a Home Server box, you can get away with putting just one hard drive—-and not a very big one-—in an HTPC. Suddenly, a Shuttle X200 or something based on a mini-ITX platform makes a lot more sense.

One of the iterations of Home Server on the market is Fujitsu Siemens’ SCALEO Home Server. This happens to be Intel’s SS4200-E (“Helena Island”) box with Home Server running on two 500GB drives. The SS4200-E is a brilliant, nearly silent box perfect for running Home Server in all but one regard; it’s a pain to set up the first time if you don’t have the right parts on hand. Because Intel’s brainy consumer NAS box is meant to be headless, meaning that it runs without peripherals and is entirely controlled across the network, creation of the first install image entails having a USB floppy drive, USB DVD drive, an ATI Radeon X300SE 128MB (recommended to me unofficially by Intel), and a special PCIe-to-PCI adapter. Once you get the config set, though, just clone and go. The handy thing about Home Server is that it only installs to one hard drive no matter how many drives you add after the fact. RAID complications are not an issue. There are easier ways to set up an SS4200-E, such as with a boot DOM, but then it would be running something besides Home Server.

I said this was a Microsoft two-fer. The other play is Microsoft’s Extenders for Windows Media Center. Yes, I know that Extenders already died once; no, I haven’t lost my mind. If your customer already has an Xbox 360, forget it. He already owns an Extender for MCE, both in XP and Vista. But if not, check out something like the Linksys DMA2100 ($299.99). There’s nothing mind-blowing here. The box is just a way to get media content, both from file and via TV tuner card, from MCE on the PC out to the TV. The big twist here is that the new breed of Extenders support HD resolutions and 802.11n wireless connectivity so that video via wireless actually works. Linksys’s DMA2200 ($349.99) adds a “built-in, upscaling DVD-Video player,” which is a fancy way of saying a cheap PC DVD drive with an integrated GPU capable of resolution scaling.

Now, Extenders are a nifty way to get PC content to the TV. What if you want to go the other way, from set-top box to PC? After all, as I stated in that cover story, half of the emerging battle with media center technology is liberating users from the confines of the couch. Ignore the stats on notebook sales at your own peril. I’m talking about placeshifting, of course, popularized by the Slingbox.

But what if you don’t want to compete with every mass marketer in town? Then I’d recommend the Pinnacle PCTV to Go HD Wireless. If you know the Slingbox, we don’t need to rehash all of that placeshifting business here. Just know that the Pinnacle unit uses IR blasters to control two home theater devices, sports a slew of I/O ports, offers 10/100 or 802.11g connectivity, records shows to the PC in any of several formats, handles 720p via component, delivers remote viewing quality on par with the Slingbox Pro, and is MCE-compatible. Also, Pinnacle’s unit costs a lot less than Sling’s.

“Some products out there aren’t living up to the promise that people expected,” says Pinnacle’s Mark Little. “So we’re going to give people something that’s already proven. Everybody knows over-the-air works. If you watch the specs on your system, then you can watch beautiful HD, and with our products, you can record it any way you want to. We’re finding a lot of people want to watch HD live in full-screen, but they also want to record some of it and translate it into something smaller and more portable.”

Words can’t convey how sweet these toys are. You can tell me how cool and eerie Bioshock is to play, but until I actually see it on a widescreen with 5.1, I won’t really get it. Same thing here. You have to show your enthusiast customers these toys in the flesh, remind them of where their bliss is.

For many of us, we forget the joy. It’s all work, work, work. Since having kids six years ago, I’ve watched exactly one movie on my home theater at full volume. I’ve nearly forgotten what a high-quality multimedia experience feels like. Someone, maybe you, needs to reconnect me and remind me of the bliss in these media products. Let me share your excitement. And if you too have forgotten where your bliss is, then maybe you should rediscover it. Because when you blend bliss with toys, the results can be infectious...and profitable. 		 
         
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