They would have made unlikely bedfellows several years ago—high-end audio retail Stereo Exchange and Microsoft—but the two co-sponsored an event last night at the high-end audio salon in lower Manhattan.

Microsoft was on hand to demonstrate the benefits of the Media Center PC platform as a home entertainment medium and Stereo Exchange wanted to show Media Center PC can be part of a high-end audio/video solution. Despite a few glitches here and there owing to a quickly-installed wireless network, the relationship appears to hold a lot of promise.

High-end Media Center PC company S1 Digital showed its line of Media Center products ranging from a $1,200 Media Center Mini Edition to a $5,500 ProLine series ultimate box. The book-size Mini is a full-fledged PC with a 100-GB hard drive and 1-GB memory that’s designed to pull information stored on a Media Center PC (and browse the Web, play games and do work, too) and show it on another TV in the house.

At the opposite end, S1 offers the mammoth $5,500-plus FX edition ProLine model with four CableCards, six hot-swappable drives offering up to5 terabytes of internal storage, HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc playback, 1080p video output and silent operation based on a special heatsink technology.

Stereo Exchange also had Media Extenders on display for the beer-budget crowd. Xbox is the current version available for Vista-based Media Center PCs. D-Link and Linksys products are due early 2008 at under $300.