My 13 year old son  sent me an email with a link to http://www.musicforrelief.org/ Rob knows I’m passionate about Dave Matthews Band, I collect their live recordings, and travel around seeing DMB shows every summer. Dave Matthews Band donated the July 5, 1997 live version of “Typical Situation”  recorded at the Irvine Meadows Amphitheater,  Irvine, Calif.

The download is a compilation of unreleased music from, Linkin Park, Dave Matthews Band, Peter Gabriel, Alanis Morissette, Slash, The All-American Rejects, Hoobastank, Kenna, Enrique Iglesias and Lupe Fiasco.  There is a separate link to donate (It’s the honor system, donate whatever amount you want.)

I thought this was a great idea, and wanted to share it with you!  It’s also a great way to get the kid’s involved in the relief efforts. Please forward this to anyone you think would like some cool tunes and would donate a few bucks for the relief efforts in Haiti. Please kindly consider posting this link http://www.musicforrelief.org/ to your Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Website, Blog, etc.

If you download the music and donate any amount, EDG will donate an additional $20.00 to the fund. We’ve set aside $1,000.00 for this, so all we need is 49 people to donate. My son Rob was the first donor and my inspiration to send this out. (Thanks Rob!)  If you donate, please send me an email at bob.gullo@edgusa.com and we’ll match your donation right-away!

by: John Sciacca

I am imminently facing a BIG birthday. As in a number that no longer starts with a 3. This has got me looking back on my life. And as I peer down that long, dusty trail, what I see is a lifetime that has been closely intertwined with technology changes and advances. I invite you on my journey, and perhaps share your own memories in the comments section.
My first electronics’ related memory goes back to when I was 7. The Atari 2600 came out. Life as I knew it would never be the same.
At age 9, I did a day’s worth of chores for my grandmother – raking leaves, cleaning the pool, vacuuming, etc. – to earn enough money to walk down to a local record store to purchase my first record: a 45 of Gary Numan’s “Cars.” I think the pay rate equated to about $.25 an hour.
My parents bought me a GE clock radio for 5th grade graduation. The kind with the glowing, blood red numbers straight from the deepest levels of Dante’s Inferno and the oh-so-sweet faux wood grain cabinet. That radio served me well for over 20 years.
The following year my grandmother got me a color TV, a sweet 13-inch Sharp model. Many, and I do mean MANY hours were spent playing Atari 2600 on this baby.
In 7th grade, after MUCH pestering, my parents finally relented and bought me a Sony Walkman. I also purchased my first cassette, Styx’s Paradise Theater.
Around the same time, I worked an entire summer washing dishes in my aunt’s Italian restaurant in Coos Bay, Oregon. (I think the pay rate had skyrocketed to $1 an hour.) I saved all my money and bought a Sony Betamax. Then I bought my first Beta movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Sophomore year in high school I bought a Magnavox portable CD player. I also bought a pair of Sony Studio Monitor headphones and my first CD, Wing’s “Greatest Hits.” Years later, I sent this player and a bunch of my favorite CDs to the woman who would become my wife.
Around this time, my interest turned to car audio. I took at job at a now defunct big-box retailer called The Goodguys! and I purchased a truly sick car stereo system. I believe I had the first 10-disc CD changer at my high school. (A high school where the class president drove a Maserati I might add.)
In my early 20s I discovered Laser Disc and Home Theater at a friend’s house. We watched Speed and I was hooked. Sounds coming from behind me? What kind of Black Magic is this and how do I get it? My first “real” HiFi purchase was a giant Definitive Technology subwoofer. Then I obtained a Carver LD player from someone who was upgrading. Pure A/V bliss! I purchased a surround system and then had the LD player “modded” to output the AC-3 (Dolby Digital) RF stream. Then I pitched Dolby Digital Laser Disc reviews to a magazine, my first break into journalism!
In 1997 DVD came out and I was there. I hedged my bet by buying a Pioneer combo LD-DVD player. First DVD purchase: Jerry Maguire.
Since then, I’ve kept steady with technology, though it seems to get harder and more expensive to do so. I replaced a 35-inch Mits tube with a 61-inch DLP. Got an 80 Gig Video iPod. (First iTunes purchase: Talking Heads double-album “The Name of this Band is Talking Heads.”) Bought a house and installed a housewide audio system. Got a PS3 which serves as my Blu-ray player. (First Blu-ray disc: Pixar’s Cars.) And last year I replaced my entire HT system with some state of the art stuff including a Pioneer Elite Plasma and an anamorphic lens equipped video projector.
For now, I’m about as up-to-date as I can be. But, after reading all the news coming out of CES this year, looks like I need to start preparing for the next 40 years and the move to 3D…

by Julie Jacobson

It may not seem hip today, but 15 years ago, this media room was the biggity bomb.

Desser Media Room

Commissioned by Ed Desser, then the president of NBA Television, the entertainment center features 18 tube TVs and a 108-inch projection screen.

“I bought a bunch of 19-inch TVs and stacked them on top of each other and thought it would be really interesting to see what — at the time — was on all three networks,” says Desser. “I liked it enough so I added some more. And I thought, if having six monitors on is good, well then, 19 has to be better.”

So Desser enlisted Electronics Design Group of Piscataway, N.J. EDG founder and president Bob Gullo recalls, “We worked with a cabinet maker, drawing sketches with pencils.” Today, EDG’s “sketches” are lifelike renderings.
Read More…

by Brent Butterworth

December saw what may be the two most significant events in the history of 3-D video. On December 17, the Blu-ray Disc Association announced the finalization of the Blu-ray 3-D standard. The following day marked the release of Avatar, which will be as important to 3-D as the Magna Carta was to the rule of law and Gilligan’s Island was to the modern sitcom.

Based on what I’ve heard, read, and watched, the 3-D we see in the home might just beat out what we see in the theater.

The standard released by the Blu-ray Disc Association requires the use of a new 3-D Blu-ray player (or a Sony Playstation 3) and a 3-D TV. It will pass on the new HDMI version 1.4 interface, so no special cabling will be required. Standard 2-D Blu-rays and DVDs will play on a 3-D player, and 3-D Blu-rays can be backward-compatible with existing 2-D Blu-ray players. Discs can carry 3-D video in full 1080p resolution.

While few specifics of the new standard have been made available to the public, manufacturers tell me that the new 3-D TVs will require that viewers wear LCD “shutter glasses. When the TV is showing the left-eye image, the left LCD shutter becomes transparent and the right shutter becomes opaque. The opposite happens for the right-eye image.

These shutter glasses may be a little clunky, and they probably won’t look terribly cool, and they’ll probably cost $100 or so to replace if you accidentally sit on them. However, they may have an advantage over the polarized glasses you need to watch Avatar, Up, and other 3-D releases in the movie theater.

When watching Avatar, I noticed that if I turned my head slightly, the sides of the image went out of alignment, as if I were looking at it with my eyes out of focus. I had to be careful to stare almost straight at the screen if I wanted the whole image in focus. LCD shutter glasses shouldn’t suffer this problem. While LCDs don’t perform the same at all angles, they shouldn’t produce the blurred images that I saw during Avatar.

The CES show in January promises lots and lots of new 3-D TVs and Blu-ray players—and lots of really impressive demos—so we’ll soon have a better idea of what the new home 3-D video technology offers us. Actual products should be available sometime around summer of 2010 … just in time for the Blu-ray release of Avatar.