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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Win Puss in Boots on Blu-ray
Michael Berk  |  Mar 02, 2012

As we've been saying for a while now, 7.1's coming of age - and, with increasing frequency and utility, it's coming to home theaters.

With a growing list of releases taking advantage of those extra channels, why not take a chance with us and get yourself a copy of Puss in Boots on Blu-ray.

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Tech2
Review: Julia Nunes' Settle Down
Geoffrey Morrison  |  Mar 02, 2012

Julia Nunes is the future. A future where talented artists bypass traditional music publishing conglomerates and make their income directly from fans.

Settle Down was bankrolled by fans, for fans. That it's a great album is almost secondary to its importance as a tangible example of what this next generation of professional musician can accomplish.

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The S&V Interview
The S+V Interview: Mass Effect 3 Audio Lead Rob Blake
Timothy J. Seppala  |  Mar 01, 2012

The Reapers are upon us. Mass Effect 3 is out next Tuesday, and with it Commander Shepard's story is coming to a close. I took the opportunity to chat with the series' audio lead, Rob Blake about his team's work in defining the Mass Effect franchise. Over the course of his career he's worked on everything from feature films to Spongebob Squarepants games, but counts his efforts at developer BioWare as the most challenging gigs he's encountered.

"What we do here dwarfs anything I've done before," he told me.

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Streaming Device Reviews
Review: Boxee Live TV
Michael Berk  |  Feb 29, 2012

If you're a Boxee Box owner, you probably noticed the revamped and streamlined main menu in the latest iteration of the OS, Boxee 1.5. The company's new USB stick goes that one better, adding live TV to the do-it-all streamer's ever-expanding repertoire.

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Tech2
Review: Fun. Some Nights
Geoffrey Morrison  |  Feb 29, 2012

Fun. is something of a supergroup, in as much as each band member had been in other reasonably successful bands prior to this one.

Some Nights, their second album, finds the trio doing what they do best: Crafting anthemic rock songs with catchy melodies and excellent musicianship.

It's a fantastic album that above all else is a great bit of (n): something that provides mirth or amusement.

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Signals
Car Tunes
Ken C. Pohlmann  |  Feb 29, 2012

8-track tape, cassette, MiniDisc, DAT. They all have two things in common. You don’t find them in new cars anymore. And, like lots of other technologies that have come and gone, car radios have easily outlasted them. Actually, add CD to that list. Within a few years, that’ll be gone. But is AM/FM radio on the endangered species list too?

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Ask S&V
AVR for 4-Ohm Speakers
Scott Wilkinson  |  Feb 29, 2012
I have a pair of Focus Audio FC8 speakers and a pair of PSB Stratus Silveris, both of which have a nominal impedance of 4 ohms. I'd like to get a new receiver in the $1500-$2000 range capable of driving these speakers that also provides Audyssey or some type of room correction. Can you reccomend some receivers, keeping in mind the 4-ohm speakers? I'm curious about Pioneer's class-D receivers, but I'm not sure how they handle 4 ohms.

Jerry Zaleski

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Home Theater Geeks Podcast
Podcast 100: Alan Parsons
Scott Wilkinson  |  Feb 28, 2012
Celebrating Home Theater Geeks' 100th episode, legendary producer, engineer, and musician Alan Parsons talks about his early days as an assistant engineer at Abbey Road Studios when the Beatles were recording their last two albums, recording and mixing Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and Michael Oldfield's Tubular Bells in quadraphonic, forming the Alan Parsons Project with collaborator Eric Woolfson, his educational 3-DVD set called The Art and Science of Sound Recording, answers to chat-room questions, and much more.

Run Time: 1:07:22

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Track One
Revisiting and Rebuilding The Wall
Mike Mettler  |  Feb 28, 2012

Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason and I have previously discussed the band’s pioneering live quad shows of the late 1960s and the amazing Immersion box sets for Wish You Were Here and The Dark Side of the Moon (the subject of our November 2011 cover stor

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Portable Player Reviews
Shine a Light: Listening to the Current Crop of Lamp Speaker Combos
Michael Berk  |  Feb 28, 2012

When Sound+Vision looked at Klipsch's LightSpeakers in the summer of 2010, we'd hardly have guessed such devices were more than novelties. Looks like we were wrong.

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