Home Theater Geeks Podcast

In this special episode live from the 2012 National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas, Leo Laporte and I walk the show floor, talking to representatives from Canon, Panasonic, JVC, and Sony about new technologies that will improve the consumer experience of TV and movies. Particularly interesting is the rapidly falling cost of 4K digital-video cameras from Canon, JVC, and Sony as well as a new 3D conversion technology from JVC. We also talk to Panasonic's Peter Fannon about the upcoming Summer Olympics in 3D and see 4K flat-panel reference monitors in the Canon, JVC, and Sony booths that look amazing even at relatively small sizes.

Run Time: 1:40:15

High-end audio legend Mark Levinson talks about how being a professional musician influences his work as an audio-product designer, the importance of imparting the emotional impact of a performance through an audio system, how the high-end audio industry has evolved during the last 40 years, the goals for his latest products under the Daniel Hertz nameplate, his work restoring archived recordings from the La Fenice opera house in Venice, Italy, answers to chat-room questions, and more. He even plays a bit on the Indian sarod!

Run Time: 58:33

Audio-product designer Bob Schulein talks about his long and distinguished career, including microphone design and his pioneering work on multichannel matrix encoding and decoding for broadcast and music recordings. He also explains his current project called ImmersAV, in which he shoots high-def video and records binaural audio to create a more immersive A/V experience. In addition, he discusses his extensive headphone measurements and how they relate to perceived sound quality, answers chat-room questions, and more.

Run Time: 1:05:46

With a last-minute guest cancellation, I spend a pleasant hour answering questions from the chat room, including how I got my start in home theater, what it might take for an Apple television to be successful, tips for speaker placement, what to consider when converting a basement to a home theater, where the best seat in a commercial theater is, motion blur on LCD TVs, video processors, RF universal remotes, HDMI Audio Return Channel, whether or not 3D is a passing fad, using two identical projectors to display 3D, and much more.

Run Time: 1:05:07

Jason Hartlove, CEO of Nanosys, Inc., explains his company's new backlight technology for LCD TVs called quantum-dot enhancement film, or QDEF, which uses nanoparticles that emit light of different colors when exposed to blue light. The emitted colors can be tightly controlled in the manufacturing process, resulting in just about any desired RGB color gamut, including the original gamut captured and intended by movie producers. A very geeky episode!

Run Time: 1:02:53

Sound designer Diego Stocco reveals how he makes almost any common object into a musical instrument, how he developed the Experibass (which Hans Zimmer hired him to play on the score for the 2009 movie Sherlock Holmes), the benefits of mixing to multichannel rather than 2-channel, the importance of high-quality audio, answers to chat-room questions, and more. We also get to watch and hear clips of some of Stocco's amazing music.

Run Time: 1:03:28

Home-theater consultant Ray Coronado and HomeTheater.com correspondents Tom Norton and Barb Gonzalez join me to discuss our impressions of CES last week, including OLED TVs, 4K flat panels, 3D, online streaming, audio, answers to chat-room questions, and more.

Run Time: 1:01:48