A/V Veteran

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.

Among the many time-sinks to be found on YouTube are predictions of the future, particularly those made years or even decades ago and anticipating what life today would be like. It's fascinating to revisit the 1950s vision of the "home of tomorrow."

Home theater encompasses a range of possibilities. For most enthusiasts it's a DIY affair. For others, it's a matter of hiring a custom installation pro to do the job.

Perhaps no subject in the home audio world is more contentious than cables. You can get them cheap in a big box hardware store (or at least speaker cables and perhaps interconnects) or pay obscene amounts of money for them. What gives?

Most Audiophiles have a pretty fair idea of how the human hearing system works, but there are always new readers who take "obvious" things for granted. I myself also recently learned a few of the finer points while perusing websites on the subject. Here's what I learned...

There's a surprisingly wide range of preferences among audio-video fans. I'll categorize them here into two broad groups: classic 2-channel audiophiles and home theater fans. Not that these groups don't overlap. They often do. But there are listeners in each group who don't intersect with the other. For fans of 2-channel music who are open to adding surround sound as long as it doesn't hamper their enjoyment of listening to stereo recordings, there's a fairly easy way to make that happen.

I didn't attend the recent CES in Las Vegas. I haven't gone since 2017. CES can be exceptionally expensive these days; the hotels and restaurants dramatically increased their prices some years ago. I once heard a possible reason why: CES attendees, it was said, didn't gamble enough to keep the lower hotel rates profitable. The obvious solution: jack up the hotel rates, both for room and food!

The disruptions of the past three years have been hard on the biggest trade shows...