Onkyo wants you to feel the home theater in a box (HTiB) love as it unleashed today three new entry level systems which only require a HDTV to get them going. The Onkyo HT-S5100, HT-S4100 and HT-S3100 will be available in April with suggested retail prices of around $580, $480 and $380, respectively.

Key highlights of these systems include a HDTV-capable audio-video receiver, five or seven surround-sound loudspeakers, powerful subwoofer and an included iPod docking station. These of course vary depending upon the specific system. For more details, read the full release after the jump.

This HTPC has some really nice specs, which include a quad-core Intel processor at 3GHz, 3GB of RAM and NVIDIA’s GeForce 8600GT with HDMI out and PureVideo HD support. Plus, you can get the unit in the color of any automotive paint you want from a basic glossy black to $10k gold-flaked. Nice!

It’s also got a 32GB SSD drive for the OS and a 1TB drive for media storage, although you’ll probably want to upgrade that to 2TB if your media collection is huge. It can also play both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs. Windows Vista Ultimate comes pre-installed and of course card readers and everything else you might expect. Which is good because the base price is just under $6k.

If the wife is screaming because your media center PC has cables running everywhere around your home theater room, you need a remedy to restore marital bliss. One possible solution might be the MediaCore and its furniture cabinet looks.

The MediaCore is a wooden enclosure which looks like a stylish European type cabinet. It is essentially a full fledged computer which is built into this thing, as you can see from the picture above. It has a forced air flow design to keep things cool and can host other A/V equipment like cable boxes to keep clutter down.

How many well known consumer electronics brands can be shoved under one stable? We may soon find out as word has come from the Land of the Rising Sun that Harman International has bid for D&M Holdings in a sale which could run the former around $700 million.

This bid, according to Bloomberg, first surfaced on Friday. This potential acquisition bumped up D&M stock in Tokyo. If this purchase were to go through, a news article from the Japan Corporate News Network suggests Harman would ending up taking “a dominant share in the global audio market.” For its part, D&M issued a statement saying reports on this are not based upon information it has provided.

To put it in perspective, D&M Holdings currently houses the brands of Denon, Marantz, Boston Acoustics and Escient, among others. Harman, meanwhile, brings to the table Harmon Kardon, Infinity, …

First off, sorry about the photo - that backside shot is the only one we could find. It belongs to the center speaker of a new series of speakers Monster announced today called the StreamLine 100. Prices vary between $300 and $600, depending upon which speaker component you need.

Monster designed the StreamLine 100 speakers to be integrated into a home theater. In this series you have a pair of towers, one center and a subwoofer. All offer interchangeable side panels with five color options, depending upon the colors lying around your room or your desire to be neurotic and change them every other day.

Home electronics company Onkyo is set to bring us two new entry level A/V receivers which are each available in black or silver finishes. The 80 watt-per-channel TX-SR576 and 75 watt-per-channel TX-SR506 are priced at around $480 and $380 respectively.

These new Onkyo A/V receivers offer dual source “powered zone 2″ capability, meaning the receiver’s rear surround amplifier channels to power stereo speakers in a second room while still listening to 5.1-channel sound in the main zone. They also both offer support for Audyssey’s new Dynamic EQ loudness correction technology.

Polk Audio has apparently begun shipments of a Sirius tuner component product it first announced late last year. The Polk Audio SR-H1000 is now available for around $350.

Sony has got to be the proprietary technology king. It seems like a new CE season hardly goes by where it isn’t unveiling something. This year’s offering is its wireless S-Air technology, appearing in a variety of new home theater systems and accessories.

When geeks set out to make home theaters, the results are often astounding, with some very cool themes. Often based on Sci-Fi flicks, these amazing works of art are expensive labors of geek love. I proudly present some of the cooler home theaters that have recently caught our eye.

KEF, a British manufacturer of home theater speakers, recently unveiled the necessary components for a new 5.1 surround sound system. It is called the KEF KHT1005.2 Series and pricing is at around $850.

The KEF KHT1005.2 Series includes a diminutive high performance subwoofer and egg-shaped speakers. KEF has its own patented driver technology for its speakers, which can reportedly “project an exceptionally broad frequency range from just a single point.” They are available in a high-gloss black finish and include mounting brackets.

$6 million is a lot of money, no doubt. What would you do with that much cash if you had it? One possible option is to hit up audiophile Jeremy Kipnis to set up for you his self described Kipnis Studio Standard. Think of it as the ultimate home theater experience.

The Kipnis Studio Standard is described by writer Steve Guttenberg as being “all about aggressively advancing the state of the art of picture and sound presentation.” Kipnis has installed in this uber-amazing screen room a massive screen which showcases video projected from “a Sony ultra-high-resolution (4,096-by-2,160) SRX-S110 digital projector.” Damm.

If you have the money, they will build it for you. That’s the motto to run through your head if you have enough cash to layout for a custom home theater from the likes of Elite Home Theater Seating. The company showed off today its themed Batman “Bat Cave” theater.

Elite HTS, as the company calls itself, has its setups in many high profile locations, including Harrods department store in London, Technicolor Studios and American High Definition in Los Angeles. The latter location is reportedly used for “many private Hollywood screenings of upcoming feature films.”

The next logical step once you have a home theater room is to find a way to make it truly unique. Some people do that by having it look like the interior of a real movie theater while others are more interested in turning it into a luxury den. But one home owner in Palm Beach County, FL took their love of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” to its fullest and transformed their home theater into the bridge of the USS Enterprise-D. Geeky? Yes. Something that you are envious of? That too.

The entire Star Trek rec area measuring 70 feet by 22 feet and is actually three rooms: the viewing room, a bar and a lounge area with its own life-sized Robby the Robot model. This Star Trek nerd heaven took six months to build from start to finish and uses one of the largest Kaleidescape …

It looks as if Creative has finally brought one of its nicer looking speaker systems to American shores. The Creative X-Fi Sound System Z600 is priced at around $300.

The Creative X-Fi Sound System Z600 is targeted towards owners of Creative’s Zen Vision:M portable media player. A dock for the player comes as part of the package and is capable of charging the PMP as it plays. Also part of the package are two two-way satellite speakers, each with a large 3.5″ driver and soft dome tweeter, and a 130-watt subwoofer.

Onkyo has released a new compact home stereo system that’s designed to integrate nicely with your digital music collection. The Onkyo BR-NX10 also has Sony’s AnyMusic service built in.

The Onkyo home stereo holds an 80GB hard drive to store digital music, and with the CD player it allows playing or ripping of the audio disks to the hard drive. This device also has a USB port to transfer files from a PC and an Ethernet port to connect to the internet. Once connected users can browse, purchase and download songs from Sony’s AnyMusic.

An FM Stereo tuner to allow recording the radio would be a nice feature in this package, however we didn’t notice any controls or features for FM radio. The BR-NX10 from Onkyo is expected to retail for about €600 (~$780 USD).

Onkyo via Akihabara News