Al Griffin

Q I have plans to buy a new LG 65EF9500 OLED TV. Here’s my question: How long a break-in period would you recommend before having it professionally calibrated? I used my current Panasonic plasma for about 100 hours before having it calibrated.  Also, can any ISF-certified technician handle an OLED TV, or does it require special training? —John Violette

A It’s recommended that you treat an OLED TV the same as you would a plasma for the first 100 hours of use, being careful not to leave fixed images like electronic program guides or paused video game frames onscreen for an extended amount of time. This will be especially important when viewing high dynamic range (HDR) content with the 65EF9500. LG even warns about the potential for burn-in in the EF9500’s manual and recommends steps you can take to prevent it, though any image retention you experience in most situations should only be temporary.

Q Do all speaker wires running to matched sets of speakers need to be the same length? I’m using 12 AWG wire to connect my AV receiver to speakers with an impedance of 6 ohms. My plan was to use 3-foot runs to my right and center speakers, a 10-foot run to the left speaker, and 26-foot and 36-foot runs, respectively, to the left and right surrounds. Will this create a problem? —Dan Donna / via e-mail

Q I’m curious to know if there’s any criteria for home theater component selection based on room dimensions. I want to focus my search on equipment that’s an appropriate match for my space. —Bill King / via e-mail

It apparently was necessary for Friedrich to reformat the original NASA 8K footage because it wouldn’t play on the Samsung 8K TV that he initially tried it with. Why not? According to Friedrich, “The whole encoding was not optimized for playback with CE-devices: wrong video levels, incompatible MPEG profile, critical bitrate.”