LATEST ADDITIONS

Signals
What’s In a Name?
Ken C. Pohlmann  |  Oct 31, 2017
“The Quality Goes in Before the Name Goes On.” If you are of a certain age, that trademarked slogan is imprinted in your brain. It was marketed relentlessly. And it was a darn good slogan. It assured you that any product with the company’s name on it was of high quality. It also redirected your attention to the importance of the name of the company itself; you didn’t need to know anything else about the product; the company’s name ensured that it was good. My, how times have changed.
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Audio Video News
Dolby Likes to Watch You Watch
Mark Fleischmann  |  Oct 30, 2017
Dolby Laboratories wants to know exactly how viewers respond to its HDR, surround sound, or color palette technologies while watching a movie. So Dolby’s chief scientist and neurophysiologist Poppy Crum has been running 15 to 20 experiments per day in which volunteers sit on a couch attached to brain monitors, heart rate monitors, galvanic skin response sensors, thermal imaging cameras, and lie detectors.
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Audio Video News
Report: Half of U.S. Homes Subscribe to Pay TV Plus At Least 1 Video Streaming Service
SV Staff  |  Oct 30, 2017
Courtesy of Parks Associates

New research from Parks Associates shows that 53 percent of U.S. broadband households subscribe to both a pay-TV service and at least one OTT (over the top) video streaming service, chosen from a field with more than 200 active services.

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Audio Video NewsNew Products
New Ceiling Speaker Designed for Big Bass, Max SPL
SV Staff  |  Oct 30, 2017
James Loudspeaker has added a high-output in-ceiling speaker to its Small Aperture (SA) line of architectural speakers.
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Audio Video News
Ovation Celebrates 30th Anniversary with 4-Day Event
SV Staff  |  Oct 27, 2017
Ovation Audio + Video is celebrating its 30th anniversary with four days of special events at its Indianapolis showroom.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Blow-Up
Josef Krebs  |  Oct 27, 2017
Picture
Sound
Extras
Auteur Michelangelo Antonioni set his story of a photographer who gradually looses perspective in the perfect place—swinging London of 1966. In the course of his jam-packed day, the freewheeling image-obsessed artist goes undercover in a shelter to snap pictures of homeless men, physically invades the spaces of various vacuous fashion models, and stakes out a couple in the park to capture pictures of their private, intimate moments.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Ronin
Brandon A. DuHamel  |  Oct 27, 2017
Picture
Sound
Extras
Ronin is director John Frankenheimer’s 1998 crime thriller, with a script co-written by David Mamet (under a pen name) and featuring an all-star cast headlined by Robert De Niro and Jean Reno. This gritty film borrows heavily from classic genre predecessors such as The French Connection, Le Cercle Rouge, and Bullitt. It follows a former U.S. intelligence agent (De Niro) working with a group of mercenaries trying to track down a package being pursued by both Irish and Russian interests.
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Editor's Eye
Train Rec: Confusion Abounds Over Color Gamut
Rob Sabin  |  Oct 27, 2017
Courtesy of Imaging Science Foundtion

If you ever wonder what the geeks at Sound & Vision do when we’re not listening to new speakers or tuning up video displays, well, we’re probably debating some arcane technical detail that most non-enthusiast mortals would neither understand nor care about. And so it was that a rather fired-up exchange of e-mails occurred recently between myself, video technical editor Tom Norton, and our contributing technical editor Kris Deering.

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Audio Video NewsNew Products
Unique Ambeo Headset Records the World Around You
SV Staff  |  Oct 27, 2017
Sennheiser has announced that the unique Ambeo Smart Headset it previewed at CES 2017 is now available.
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AV Receiver ReviewsSurround Processor Reviews
Rotel RAP-1580 Surround Amplified Processor Review
Mark Fleischmann  |  Oct 26, 2017

Audio Performance
Features
Ergonomics
Value
PRICE $3,800

AT A GLANCE
Plus
Muscular Class A/B amp
PC-USB and phono inputs
Dolby Atmos and DTS:X 7.1.4 decoding
Minus
No auto setup
Limited access to seven-channel amp for Atmos/DTS:X

THE VERDICT
Rotel returns to analog amplification for their latest top-of-the-line home theater machine—and the results are golden.

Is the Rotel RAP-1580 the surround receiver that dares not speak its name? In keeping with the two-channel distinction between stereo receivers and integrated amplifiers, Rotel calls it a surround amplified processor because it doesn’t include an AM/FM tuner. But to my mind, the defining trait of a surround receiver is that it combines a surround preamp/processor and a multichannel amp in one box. So I prefer to call this an audiophile receiver. You say tomato... [Editor’s Note: I’d call it a surround amplifier, and I don’t think it’s the last of this type we’ll be seeing...but, whatever.—RS]

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