New Product review

The Sony VAIO XL2 Digital Living System ($2,699.99 direct) is an update to the slickly designed and unique VAIO XL1 system I looked at last year. It continues the company's path toward Media Center nirvana. Like the XL1, the new XL2 is a MCE PC that easily replaces your TiVo, CD changer, DVD player, and more. It's perfect addition to your home theater, particularly if you own an HDTV with an HDMI port.

Like its predecessor, the XL2 comes in two parts. There's the sleek PC unit, which houses the usual PC components such as processor, memory, and hard drives; and then there's the 200-disc DVD/CD changer, also known as the XL1B. The changer is designed to itemize, scan, and store humongous CD collections. For example, you can load up to 200 CDs into the VAIO before you go to sleep, and by noon the next day, you'll have all 3,000-odd songs ripped to your hard drive. The XL2 even catalogs the ID3 tags (song title/album/artist info) and album art for you automatically. I discovered, however, that the settings in Windows Media Player govern the way your music files are handled: WMP is set to rip to WMA in the My Music folder by default. You'll need to change things manually if you want only MP3 files or for your files to sit in another folder.

This media changer is noticeably quieter than the first edition. It still makes noises when accessing discs but is much less disturbing in a living-room environment. The XL1B is also available separately for $799.99 (direct) to any MCE PC users with Update Rollup 2; this update from Microsoft will work on any MCE 2005 PC and includes support for the FireWire/i.Link based changer. You can connect up to five changers to the XL2, for a total of 1,000 discs, if you need that sort of capacity.

The wireless keyboard, which has a built-in touchpad, and the 802.11b/g wireless networking are holdovers from the XL1, and they are most welcome. I especially like that the XL2 ditches the usual ugly USB dongle in favor of a built-in IR port for the MCE remote. All these features help the XL2 avoid wire clutter.

The XL2 PC isn't much faster than the XL1 it replaces, since the Intel Pentium D 920 processor's 2.8-GHz clock speed is the same as the Pentium D 820's. The D 920, though, has twice the amount of L2 Cache, so it is more efficient. System memory is also improved to 1GB (up from 512MB), and there is more hard drive space. All these tweaks help improve performance. The XL2's 320GB drive space is roomier than the XL1's 200GB, but since the XL2 comes with an HDTV tuner, I really think the system deserves at least 500GB or, better yet, 1TB of drive space, especially considering that it costs $500 more than the XL1.

In addition, the XL2 has an nVidia GeForce 6600GT graphics card, which is much more capable than the XL1's older GeForce 6200 graphics, and should be able to handle Windows Vista's new, snazzy Aero UI. On my tests, the 6600GT let the system play Doom 3 at a decent 55 frames per second. The XL2's Windows Media Encoder score of 9 minutes 31 seconds is also good for an MCE PC, and its Adobe Photoshop CS2 score of 1:25 is above average. Certainly the XL2 has enough power to do just about all the multimedia tasks expected of it in the living room.

Compared with Media Center competitors such as the HP z556 Digital Entertainment Center, the Sony VAIO XL2 Digital Living System measures up well. Both machines have horizontal form factors that are living-room friendly. The z556 is much less expensive, at under $1,500, but it is not as well configured, with only 512MB of RAM, an ATSC/HDTV tuner and 250GB of hard drive space. The VAIO XL2's dual-core D 920 processor is more versatile, which helps keep performance levels stable when the machine is recording and encoding. That said, the z556 is more expandable because of its HP Personal Media drive, a removable cartridge hard drive; the XL2 has two 160GB hard drives for storage.

The Viiv-compatible Sony VAIO XL2 is a great choice for the DVD and CD collector in your family, and it's one of the best ways to convert your CD collection over to MP3 or WMA effortlessly. It fits well in the living room too, and it can sit near your DVD player and A/V receiver without standing out. It's the sleekest living-room Media Center PC I've seen.

See how the Sony Vaio XL2 Digital Living System measures up to similar systems in our media center comparison chart.