And Cinepro delivers on this promise. They used three pairs of their new Cinepro Evolution Mighty Powershelf speakers ($3,295 per pair, pictured above), each standing less than 14 inches tall. They teamed the Powershelf speakers with the Mighty Center Channel ($2,695), as well as two Evo subs ($4,995 each)—and all of their own Cinepro processing and amplification. To put it mildly, it was outrageous home theater. I don’t know what decibel levels they were hitting, but I can honestly say the entire sides of my trousers were moving as if in a strong breeze.

The kicker was that my ears didn’t feel like they were bleeding afterwards; this was what Gus had meant at the beginning of the demo. We featured the company’s Evo-2 system in Home Theater magazine in May of 2005. That system came in at around $70,000; the system I heard at HES comes in at around $50,000. While that’s not exactly cheap, it does represent the fact that you can have a stellar theatrical sound experience at a fraction of the cost of some systems.

It would be completely remiss of me to not mention the other components that played a major role at the Cinepro demo: The Vidabox Lux media center with Blu-ray and HD DVD playback, plus dual ARSC HDTV tuners ($7,000). This full-function server is capable of storing music, television programming, and movies on its hard drive. It has a Microsoft Media Center front end for easy access to all of your media (i.e., home movies, photos, music, etc.). With multizone capability and the ability to record HDTV, this could be the box of the future.

The projector the team chose for the show was the SIM2 Domino Series D80 1080p DLP projector ($8,500), which they paired with the Screen Innovations TMS-80 screen ($449). Again, this was a full-experience professional-grade demo. In fact, it was so good in the minuscule proportions of a hotel bedroom, I’d like to get all of these components together at our own testing lab for a full review for HT magazine. What do you say, guys?