LATEST ADDITIONS

The Connected Life
4 Things to Keep in Mind When Wall Mounting a TV
John Sciacca  |  Sep 30, 2015
As a custom installer, meeting with clients building new homes, remodeling, or just looking to upgrade their entertainment systems is a big part of my job. And after 17 years of walking through job sites and looking at blueprints, I pretty quickly hone in on the few key areas that determine the project’s difficulty and cost.
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Audio Video News
This Is Your Brain on Music
Mark Fleischmann  |  Sep 30, 2015
Music services like Pandora generate musical recommendations based on your listening habits. Will the next step be to recommend music based on your brain type? In a study called “Musical Preferences Are Linked to Cognitive Styles,” researchers at the University of Cambridge asked 4,000 participants to fill out questionnaires and rate several pieces of music. Their goal was to classify listeners according to the E-S (empathizingsystemizing) theory.
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Audio Video NewsNew Products
Bose Goes Wi-Fi and Gets Appy
Mark Fleischmann  |  Sep 30, 2015
The demand for mass-market audio products is moving deeper into wireless territory and the smart money is moving with it. Bose, perhaps the epitome of smart money, is moving in that direction too. The key point of yesterday's press event was not so much the introduction of a new product—though there was one—but the development and extension of the Bose wireless strategy.
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Remotely Possible
New Sonos Trueplay Tuning Tech and PLAY:5 Are Stunning
Darryl Wilkinson  |  Sep 29, 2015
Sonos is already the king of the hill when it comes to “filling your home with music” (a.k.a., wired and/or wireless multi-room streaming audio systems that are convenient, easy-to-use, and sound great). But later this year, when the company rolls out the “all-new” new PLAY:5 and the absolutely stunning room-acoustic-tuning technology, called Trueplay, Sonos is likely to become—like Kleenex®, BAND-AID®, and Xerox®—synonymous with the entire product category it helped create.

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Headphone Reviews
Hifiman HE1000 Headphone Review
Steve Guttenberg  |  Sep 29, 2015

Performance
Build Quality
Comfort
Value
PRICE $2,999

AT A GLANCE
Plus
Luxurious design
Extraordinarily spacious sound
Advanced nano-thin planar magnetic drivers
Minus
A big, definitely not-so-portable headphone
Crazy expensive

THE VERDICT
The HiFiman HE1000 is pricey, but it sounds so clear and open other headphones sound dull and drab by comparison.

What? $2,999 for headphones? Can they be worth it? Yes, and yes. It’s not just that the Hifiman HE1000 sounds more transparent, spacious, and dynamic than other headphones: With the HE1000, music arrives more intact—there’s more there there.

The Hifiman HE1000’s open quality makes you realize not all open-back headphones sound equally open. You don’t have to be an engineer to understand why: Just look at the HE1000 ear cups’ thin horizontal blades that minimize reflections to a remarkable degree and expose most of the back surface of the diaphragm to the air.

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A/V Veteran
My Two Cents on News Around the AV World
Thomas J. Norton  |  Sep 29, 2015
It’s fall, and a young man’s fancy (and we hope a woman’s as well) turns to thoughts of evenings by a roaring fire listening to music or watching a movie or two on that new flat screen UHD TV (hopefully not mounted above said fireplace!). There have been so many interesting posts to the S&V website recently that I can’t resist the temptation to offer a few thoughts on some of them. Some commenters to these individual posts have beaten me to the punch, but I’ll press on.

Paradigm Concept I’ll soon be finishing up a review of the Paradigm Prestige 95F loudspeaker for our sister publication Stereophile. No sneak peeks here, but it has certainly grabbed my attention.

So I was intrigued when I read about the prototype Paradigm Concept 4F.

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Signals
Toshiba's Bad Math
Ken C. Pohlmann  |  Sep 29, 2015
It's not easy being a corporation. Take Volkswagen, for example. Right about now, they are probably wishing that Ferdinand Porsche had never stuffed an air-cooled engine in the back of a Beetle-shaped car. Along similar lines, Toshiba probably wishes it had hired more ethical accountants. In particular, it recently announced that it had overstated its profits by $1.3 billion over seven years. Oops. Not exactly a rounding error.

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Audio Video NewsNew Products
Earphones Made of Brass. What Next?
SV Staff  |  Sep 29, 2015
That’s right. Earphones made of brass—the same brass used to make trumpets to be specific. If you’re going to introduce a headphone in a market flooded with tens of thousands of models, you better be creative.
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Audio Video NewsNew Products
New Wadia Digital Audio Decoder Does DSD
SV Staff  |  Sep 29, 2015
The digital wizards at Wadia have announced that their latest digital audio decoder, the di322, supports the playback of DSD64, DSD128 and DSD256 music files via its USB input along with PCM files with sampling rates up to 32-bit/384kHz, including DXD 352.8kHz and DXD 384kHz formats.

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Audio Video News
Owners of Defective Mitsubishi LaserVue TVs May Be Entitled to Repair Refund
SV Staff  |  Sep 28, 2015
Owners of Mitsubishi LaserVue rear-projection TVs who experienced problems and paid to have work done may be entitled to a refund, according to the terms of a recently settled class-action lawsuit brought by consumers over picture problems that appeared after 8,000 to 10,000 hours of use.
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