Location Free:

You Wanna Take It Outside?

By The Vann’s Editorial Team

You live in an electronic age, and you want your house to reflect that fact in all your audio and video choices. You want the highest quality sights and sounds in your home theater, your kitchen, each bedroom, even out on the deck. You want to live beyond the living room. But what the heck are you supposed to do, take out a second mortgage and buy separate receivers and DVD players for every room? Sure, a single high-end multi-channel receiver would enable you to listen to your favorite radio station on the deck while your kids are watching some animated monster movie for the umpteenth time in the basement, but even something simple as that would require you to hack a half dozen holes in your walls, buy a bevy of wall panels, and snake cable behind all that drywall in order to distribute A/V throughout the house.

Imagine distributed home audio and video without the hassle, without the bank-breaking bill, and with absolutely no cords. Imagine accessing the digital photos stored on your PC hard drive and displaying them on the flat panel television in your kitchen. Imagine your kids sent into the other room to battle it out on wireless controllers far from your ears and far from their Xbox 360 game console. Imagine waking to the latest cable news without cluttering up the beauty of your bedroom plasma television with a set top box. Imagine all that and more without the hassle of attaching cameras, or cords, or even receivers. Tired of tripping on the coaxial cable used to deliver cable TV? Location Free distributes that, too. All you’ll need is one cable into the house, and you’ll have unlimited programming in every room. Ditto TiVo, if you go that route. It’s all possible with the Sony Location Free base station. Your living room just got a whole lot bigger.

Here’s the thing: when you pair the potential of a base station with a digital media center, you move from the realm of kinda cool to truly earth-shattering, and unleash the true power of Location Free technology. Imagine being able to digitally access your CD and DVD library in its entirety from any room in the house. You’ll never have to load or unload a CD or DVD again, because they’re all safely archived in your media center carousel, yet immediately available at the click of a remote. Maybe you’ve used the hard drive on your SONY VGX-XL2 or other media center to record the latest episode of your favorite sitcom, and you want to watch it on your under-cabinet TV as you cook dinner. Or, maybe you’ve programmed your media center to record the whole season and now you’re ready for an 18-hour marathon while you relax in bed. Maybe the big moment in the big game occurred right as you made your big break for the fridge, and you desperately want to rewind and see what you missed. It’s all the same, and all as easy as can be, using the ultra-convenient Location Free onscreen remote to control all your devices.

"From any room in the house" doesn’t do justice, however, to one of Location Free’s greatest perks. You’ll be able to access everything - your CDs, DVDs, computer hard drive, cable programming, everything! - from any Internet hotspot, anywhere in the world. Miss your kids when you’re stuck in Kuala Lumpur International Airport? Click, connect, and there they are. Not that you have to be that far away to see the benefit of being totally connected. Maybe you just want to watch movies from your hot tub on the deck. Yet another do-able dream, compliments of Location Free technology. So, whether you’re circling the globe or merely relaxing on the lawn, you can bring along the entire living room, without packing a thing.

Each svelte, micro-thin Location Free receiver speaks to the Location Free base station, which is parked right next to the media center in your living room, controlling it with an IR blaster. If you have a wireless router, an Internet connection, and an insatiable need to be entertained, you have all you need to get the most out of Location Free technology.