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Entertainment Centers:
A home
entertainment center (or stereo console) is a piece of furniture seen
in many homes in North America, which houses major electronic items,
such as a television set, a VCR and/or DVD player, stereo components
(such as an AM/FM tuner, multi-disc compact disc changer, record
player, one or more cassette players and graphic equalizer), and cable
or satellite television receivers. A stereo console would contain
components built into a cabinet, as was popular in the 1960s. These
would be replaced by high-fidelity component stereos by the 1970s
which offered much higher performance without being attached to
furniture, or being tied to one brand of equipment.
The term
home entertainment center may also refer to the complete package – the
electronic components and the unit in which they are housed. The unit
is often either an armoire or a self-contained unit (usually of wood
and glass); they often contain dedicated areas (either drawers or
other spaces) for storage of records, videotapes, compact discs and/or
DVD discs.
In many homes, an entertainment center is often placed in the
living
room,
family room or
recreation room.
Perhaps the first example of a built-in entertainment center was
created by Frank Lloyd Wright at his 1917 Hollyhock House in Los
Angeles, California. Custom cabinetry and speakers may be built into
or added to an existing house at some expense over free-standing
furniture, and video and / or audio signals wired or wirelessly sent
to other rooms in the home by dedicated cables, or over a local area
network.
The term home entertainment center was widely used in the 1980s. It is
being replaced by home theater system for large rooms. While high
fidelity previously required large turntables, tape decks and
speakers, the changing technology of music formats have made small
bookshelf systems, Bose desktop radios, and iPod based speaker systems
which can also produce music of high quality and serve as music
entertainment systems, making large component systems again a niche
high end market.
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