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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Cloud Atlas
Chris Chiarella  |  Oct 31, 2013
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Cloud Atlas is something of a cinematic curiosity. It is incredibly ambitious and deftly executed, weaving together six disparate tales with similar themes of oppression and rebellion, each told with the same handful of actors playing the key roles in each scenario. Set in different locations and in eras ranging from 1849 up through 2321, the movie serves up everything from a single slave earning his freedom on a sailing ship to a genetically engineered hostess inspiring a full-on societal revolt. But even when the all-star filmmaking team of the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer has three hours to play with, not one of the half-dozen narratives can be particularly deep or overwhelmingly original. They have, however, fashioned an enormous event movie that pushes technique—dramatic as well as purely technical—into bold new territory.
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3D Blu-ray Movie ReviewsBlu-ray Movie Reviews
Oz the Great and Powerful
Corey Gunnestad  |  Oct 31, 2013
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3D-ness
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Good witches, bad witches, good witches who become bad witches; it’s all in a day’s work for the Wizard of Oz. The story of how the Wizard of Oz first arrived in Oz and became the great and powerful Wizard of Oz is chronicled in Oz the Great and Powerful. This prequel to The Wizard of Oz pays reverent homage to the original classic film in many ways but most noticeably by mimicking its famous prologue. Just like when Dorothy leaves Kansas and her monochromatic world magically morphs to glorious, exhilarating Technicolor, so it goes for the Wizard as well. After a 20-minute black-and-white prologue cropped in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio, Oz’s balloon arrives somewhere over the rainbow, the image bursts into vibrant color, and the aspect ratio expands to a full 2.40:1.
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Audio Video News
B&O Debuts WiSA-based Wireless Theater System
Rob Sabin  |  Oct 31, 2013
With the introduction this week of the BeoLab 17 compact speaker, BeoLab 18 column speaker, and the BeoLab 19 powered subwoofer, luxury A/V manufacturer Bang & Olufsen has begun marketing its first component-quality wireless music system and the first wireless system from anyone to offer WiSA certification.

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Audio Video News
17 Years of Tech: Measuring Progress in Cicada Terms
Michael Antonoff  |  Oct 31, 2013
Seventeen years is an odd interval for measuring progress, but if you’d been sleeping under a pile of VHS cassettes and emerged as a flash mob of cicadas, you’d be impressed by how far home entertainment technology has come.
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Ask S&V
Using an HDTV as an HDMI Switcher
Al Griffin  |  Oct 31, 2013
Q My new TV has four HDMI inputs. Would I get better picture quality if I bypassed my receiver and hooked all the equipment up directly to the TV? I also plan to run a TosLink digital audio cable from the TV to the receiver for sound. Any issues there to consider? —Jose / Colorado Springs, CO

A Whether or not you’ll get better picture quality from your proposed setup depends on the video capabilities of the receiver you’ve been using to handle HDMI switching. A number of A/V receivers provide both high-quality video deinterlacing/scaling and an ability to pass-through 1080p signals with no degradation (this Marantz that Sound & Vision recently reviewed, for example). But some other models are known to reduce the chroma (color) resolution of signals passing through, or to clip above-white and below-black information at the extreme ends of the video brightness range.

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Speaker Buying TipsThe Connected Life
Soundbars: Are They Sonic Solutions?
John Sciacca  |  Oct 29, 2013
Perusing your favorite AV site (it’s this one, right?!), browsing real or virtual aisles of an electronics store, or surfing the Web, you’ve undoubtedly run across multiple companies offering to improve your audio by adding a soundbar. With models ranging from sub $100 to over $2,000, it’s a category that has exploded practically overnight.

In a way, soundbars can be likened to nuclear power; used correctly, they can improve your life, but misused can kill everyone in the world several times over. (I don’t have all the science needed to back that up, but I’m pretty sure it’s true.)

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Music ReviewsThis Week
This Week in Music, October 29, 2013: Arcade Fire’s “Reflektor” (or, the trials and tribulations of a rock critic, part 896)
Ken Richardson  |  Oct 29, 2013
Also: Humble Pie expanded, Jethro Tull remixed in 5.1, and much more. Plus: the return of Dorothy Wiggin. (She used to be a Shagg.)

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Grace NotesAudio Video News
Lou Reed RIP: A Final Walk On the Wild Side
Leslie Shapiro  |  Oct 28, 2013
Iconic indie-rocker Lou Reed passed away at the age of 71 on Sunday, October 27th from complications after a recent liver transplant. Reed was married to experimental performance artist Laurie Anderson. Although Reed had only a single top-ten hit, he will be remembered for so much more.

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Audio Video News
Onkyo Introduces Free HF Player App with 16,000-Band EQ
SV Staff  |  Oct 25, 2013
In a move that Onkyo hopes will revolutionize how iOS users enjoy music on headphones and other compatible hi-fi systems, the company has introduced the HF Player app that enables playback of high-resolution audio files while giving listeners unprecedented control over how their music sounds.
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Tech2
An Open Letter to Headphone Manufacturers
Lauren Dragan  |  Oct 24, 2013
Dear Manufacturers of Headphones,
As a headphone tech reviewer and avid consumer for several years now, I’ve gotten a chance to witness great triumph and tragedy in headphone design and functionality. We’ve come such a long way from the giant forever-alone-in-my-room over-ears of the ‘70s or the foam-and-plastic-electro-shock-hazards from the walkman fueled ‘80s. But there is always room for improvement. I know it, my readers sure know it, and they let me know about it. So I wanted you, dear Headphone Companies, to know it too. Here are some features that seem really obvious, but are sorely lacking in the marketplace. If you could see it in your hearts to add them to products that also sound really great, well, we’ll all just throw our money at you. Promise.
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