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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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Audio Video News
Sharp to Launch 8K TV in Japan
SV Staff  |  Sep 28, 2015
Sharp has announced that it will begin limited sales in Japan of the 85-inch“Super Hi-Vision” 8K TV it demonstrated at CES in January.

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Ask S&V
Is There a Dolby Atmos Add-On Processor?
Al Griffin  |  Sep 28, 2015
Got a tech question for Sound & Vision? Email us at AskSandV@gmail.com

Q Is there an add-on processor, either available now or forthcoming, that will add Dolby Atmos decoding capability to an existing preamp/processor or receiver? —D. Lockett

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Tech2
Julia Nunes “Some Feelings” Review
Geoffrey Morrison  |  Sep 26, 2015
I can’t stop listening to it. I’m listening to it again as I write this.
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The S&V Interview
James Guthrie on Mixing Roger Waters and Pink Floyd in 5.1
Mike Mettler  |  Sep 25, 2015
Good things come to those who wait, as the saying goes. But when it comes to finally getting producer/engineer James Guthrie’s long-awaited 96kHz/24-bit mix of Roger Waters’ 1992 solo album Amused to Death in 5.1 on Blu-ray in hand, well… the word “good” isn’t quite good enough. “Great” is certainly a step up, but I’m going to have to go with a superlative along the lines of “stellar,” “outstanding,” and/or “stunning,” for Guthrie’s surround-sound treatment of Amused catapults an oft-overlooked entry in Waters’ storied canon of work into a new sonic stratosphere. Recently, Guthrie and I spent a fair amount of time going over his goals for bringing Amused into the surround universe and sharing his favorite moments from The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here in 5.1, plus he reveals exclusively what Floyd-related project he’ll next tackle in 5.1. It’s a miracle — another miracle.
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