A/V Veteran

In 1997 I was on the staff of Stereophile magazine as a consulting technical editor, and also a contributor to (and later the editor of) the Stereophile Guide to Home Theater, at the time a nascent publication subsumed into Sound & Vision in the mid 20-aughts (itself a very long story!)

In any case, we were visited that year by Phil Abbate, then a reporter for the AAS (Atlanta Audio Society, today the Atlanta Audio Club). Phil interviewed me during his visit to Santa Fe, New Mexico, then the headquarters of Stereophile. Whether that interview ever made it into the pages of the AAS (or onto the bits of the then also nascent Internet) I don't know. But during a recent effort to sort out my increasingly cluttered files I ran across a copy of that interview, which Phil had sent me shortly after it happened.

A recent editorial in our sister publication, Stereophile, and some recent experiences I've had in dealing with Bluetooth, raised once more the related subjects of digital audio and audio compression. Digital audio can only exist by slicing the source signal up into pieces that can be manipulated and used immediately or stored for later reassembly in the analog domain.

I've written about animated films before, but there are always new ones to discover, as well as older titles to revisit. To beat a live horse yet again (Maximus in Tangled, for example, not Maximus in Gladiator) I continue to be disappointed that adult friends, when visiting for a movie night, reject out of hand any suggested animated titles. Some, I suspect, haven't seen an animated movie since they were 12, an age at which they abandoned anything they considered to be childish diversions beneath their newfound sophistication. But just as live action films can offer things that animated titles cannot, the reverse is certainly true. Here are six more of my favorite animated movies.

1983's WarGames offered a prescient take on today's emerging concerns about artificial intelligence (AI), though the film envisioned something more apocalyptic than worries over being replaced by robots.

OK, I haven't seen Barbie. Nor do I have any intention of doing so, even it if shows up for free on a streaming service. My only...ah...exposure to Barbie was in the Toy Story franchise, where she was basically a third-stringer. But Barbie was a apparently big deal for years for young girls, who are now all grown up and yearn for nostalgia wrapped around some new-fashioned man-shaming.

But I did see Oppenheimer in my local IMAX...

In my previous blog, shopping for a New TV, I discussed all of the various types of today's HDTVs. Hopefully that helped limit your choice to either an OLED or an LCD-based LED TV. But now you're headed to the store where you'll be surrounded by a legion of such HDTVs. Here are a few tips to help you choose a model that's right for you.