Halo 3? No hurry! Rendered in heart-pounding high-def and surround, Gears of War (Microsoft, Xbox 360, Rated M) skyrockets the bar for future generations of sci-fi shooters. You're Marcus Fenix, former war hero imprisoned for treason, now set free to fight the Locust Horde - a nightmarish race of bloodthirsty beasts.
What I'm about to tell you might not make any sense. In fact, it might even upset you a little. But I'm your friend, and I've promised to tell you the truth about your A/V gear, so it's a risk I'm willing to take. Here goes: Your TV doesn't look right.
The consumer electronics industry has done a pretty lousy job of educating everyone on new audio and video technology. And by "industry," I mean manufacturers, their marketing arms, and even journalists, though none at UltimateAV. Start with your newspapers of record. Michael Fremer has palpitations reading the New York Times audio / video coverage (I get the same effect from their Op-ed page!).
The third generation of HD DVD players is likely to break through the $399 list-price barrier, the second generation already having done so at the street-price level. List prices may even hit $299 a little farther down the road, according to a Toshiba executive quoted in PC World. Look for details at CES next week. Unless the Blu-ray camp matches the deal, HD DVD will continue to retain the advantage in price. Another breakthrough came last week in the first HD DVD hack. This could be bad news for HD DVD. While the format uses the same AACS content-security system as Blu-ray, Sony's format adds an additional layer of BD+.
By now you may have read Al Griffin's review of the Sony PlayStation 3 game console featured in the January 2007 Sound & Vision. Since Sony is the major driving force behind the development of the Blu-ray Disc format, it's no real surprise that Al found the PS3 to be a stellar movie player.
In a career spanning four decades, Sunfire's founder and chief designer Bob Carver has morphed from bushy to bald, young Turk to elder (or at least older) statesman, and iconoclast to anointed icon. Throughout, one thing neither he nor his designs has ever been is dull, and Sunfire's latest "Theater Grand" A/V receiver is no exception.
<I> In this guest blog, contributor Steven Stone looks at the Algolith Flea, a $995 outboard video noise reduction box. In the blog entry following this one, I take a look at the $2995 Mosquito, Algolith's most sophisticated video noise reduction device.
Algolith's Mosquito is an outboard video noise reduction device that Algolith describes as an "analog and digital compression artifact reducer." At $3000, it may be the most expensive device of its kind offered to consumers. It may also be the most sophisticated. If you judge your audio-video components by weight, it won't make much of an impact. But weight has little to do with the performance of this sort of product.
