Top home theater picks

Denon's AV receiver has built-in AirPlay, outstanding sound quality, and six HDMI inputs--what more could you want? It's an excellent gift for the home theater enthusiast looking to upgrade the centerpiece of their home audio system.

Here's how you know the Roku LT is a great product: it's both the cheapest and one of the best streaming-video boxes we've tested. Roku has managed to shave the price all the way down to $50, jettisoning unnecessary features, while keeping all of the streaming content we love--Netflix, Amazon Instant, Hulu Plus and Pandora, to name a few. It's hard to find a better value than the Roku LT, making it our Editors' Choice in the category and one of the best gift options this holiday season.

Cheap, small, sounds great: pick two. That's how home audio almost always works, but Energy's Take Classic 5.1 system breaks the mold by offering awesome sound quality in a tiny package for $400. It's one of the best home audio values you're going to find.

A quality universal remote is one of the best gifts to give. A lot of people can't get past the idea of spending more than $50 on a remote, but once they use one they'll never let it go. Logitech's Harmony 650 is the best universal remote to buy for less than $100.

Sony's marketing campaign for the PS3 is "It Only Does Everything" and, well, it's pretty much true. There's no other gift you can give that packs in Blu-ray, media streaming, and HD gaming all into one box and its new $250 price makes it a bargain.

Whether you're looking to upgrade from an aging DVD player or you want the latest streaming-media service, Panasonic's DMP-BDT210 is the Blu-ray player to get. It's the fastest player we've tested, it has built-in Wi-Fi, and it supports Netflix, Amazon Instant, and Pandora.

Sometimes bigger is better, especially when it comes to home audio. Pioneer's SP-PK21BS is a solid gift choice for a budding audiophile with plenty of space, as it offers incredible sound quality for the price, but the speakers are huge.

The Panasonic DMP-BDT210 may be our favorite Blu-ray player overall, but the LG BD670 is a better pick if you mostly care about streaming media. Its suite of streaming-media services includes Netflix, Amazon Instant, Hulu Plus, MLB.TV, Vudu, MOG, and vTuner, plus its user interface is the best we've seen this year.

If you already have an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, the Apple TV is a great companion. The really killer feature here is AirPlay, which lets you stream audio or video straight from your iOS device right to your TV.