The best thing we can say about the Theater’s music performance is that the sound is very clear. (We’d checked out a pre-production unit, and the audio had been faint and terrible. The final product sounds as it should.) If you want to throw a bunch of music onto a USB drive and play it through your home theater, Seagate’s device will get the job done. But this “entertainment device” interface couldn't possibly be more boring. Where’s the cover art? That black background must be saving energy, like Blackle.com. Yeah, that’s it. Sure.

But wait. After several conversations with Seagate, we learned that the Theater does display album art, but only if you’re willing to take the effort to make it happen. In our example, if we had found a JPEG of the cover for Bowling for Soup’s album and stuck it in the folder with our song file, it would have displayed in the Theater. Seagate's reason for not syncing album art with songs, as iTunes and many other media apps do, is that doing so would clutter up the photo collection. If you don’t organize your media into folders and just dump everything into one bucket, even applying the Photo filter would leave you looking at random cover art images mixed in with the photos you really want to see.