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This Week
This Week in Music, July 23, 2013: Rediscover America with Van Dyke Parks
Ken Richardson  |  Jul 23, 2013

Van Dyke Parks: Songs Cycled

New release (Bella Union)
Photo by Roman Cho

This is the first new album credited to Van Dyke Parks alone since 1989’s Tokyo Rose, but the dozen tracks are actually the A- and B-sides of six singles he released on his own label, Bananastan, in 2011 and ’12. Furthermore, whereas four of the A-sides are indeed new-since-1989 original songs (and another track is a co-write), five selections are arrangements of traditional, folk, or classical material, and the remaining two are re-recordings of earlier Parks compositions.

On paper, then, Songs Cycled is a hodgepodge. But when did we ever listen to Van Dyke Parks on paper? Fact is, the 12 numbers miraculously form a coherent whole — an album that, true to its creator’s longtime ambition, celebrates the glorious sound of music.

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This Week
This Week in Movies & TV, July 23, 2013: Sleepwalking Through a Trance
 |  Jul 23, 2013
This 1997 tale of middle-class conformity and malaise, directed by Ang Lee (Life of Pi, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain) tells of the Connecticut suburb of New Canaan circa 1973, a land of bored, half-hearted adult experimentation with long-term relationships and casual sex while their youngsters experience their own first exciting and troubling attempts at the same.
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Audio Video News
LG Introduces First Big-Screen OLED TV in the U.S.
HT Staff  |  Jul 23, 2013
Super-Thin, Curved Screen Model Launched at Best Buy’s Magnolia Design Center

In a surprise move, LG Electronics announced yesterday that the first OLED TV in the U.S. is being offered for sale at Best Buy’s flagship Magnolia Design Center store in Richfield, MN.

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Audio Video NewsNew Products
Kaleidescape Introduces $3,995 Movie Server
HT Staff  |  Jul 23, 2013
Kaleidescape today introduced the Cinema One movie server, its first product designed for retail distribution. The $3,995 server provides storage and instant access to up to 100 high-definition Blu-ray or 600 DVD-quality movies. Until now, the company made products that were available only through custom installers.
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Tech2
Primer: CEA-2010 Page 2
Brent Butterworth  |  Jul 23, 2013

The CEA-2010 subwoofer output measurement lets us separate the great subwoofers from the merely good ones, in a way that's more reliable and repeatable than traditional measurements or listening tests. However, it's still not widely used.

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Tech2
Primer: CEA-2010 Page 3
Brent Butterworth  |  Jul 23, 2013

The CEA-2010 subwoofer output measurement lets us separate the great subwoofers from the merely good ones, in a way that's more reliable and repeatable than traditional measurements or listening tests. However, it's still not widely used.

Continue Reading »
Tech2
Primer: CEA-2010
Brent Butterworth  |  Jul 23, 2013

The CEA-2010 subwoofer output measurement lets us separate the great subwoofers from the merely good ones, in a way that’s more reliable and repeatable than traditional measurements or listening tests. However, it’s still not widely used.

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Remotely Possible
TVs and Soundbars: What a Bracket
Darryl Wilkinson  |  Jul 22, 2013
I’ve been sampling a variety of soundbars lately, ranging in price from $300 to $3,900. Despite the generic term – “soundbar” or “surround bar” – it’s actually a very diverse and interesting category with all sorts of subcategories within the soundbar umbrella: active, passive, LCR-only, LCR plus discrete rears, and etc. It’s also a category that can arouse understandably strong emotions of disgust and disdain among purists and quite a few custom installers. For millions of people, however, simplicity usually trumps sound quality; and the soundbar tsunami continues to swell and is unlikely to crest anytime soon.

But the pencil-thin form factor of flat-panel TVs is at odds with the acoustic principles speaker engineers currently take advantage of. The result is a shotgun marriage of something that is skinny with a partner that is usually a bit bigger-boned. Both of the home-theater spouses, though, do share a common aspect. Each one performs best when viewed/listened to from a position directly in front of the it. And therein lies a problem: what do you do with the soundbar if you turn the flat-panel on its base or otherwise change the angle of the TV (if it’s mounted on a tilting, pivoting, or full-motion wall mount from, for example, companies such as OmniMount, Triple Play designs from Bell’O, or Sanus)? In a more extreme case, what’s to be done with the soundbar if the TV is mounted in a corner?

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On-Wall Speaker Reviews
PSB Imagine W3 On-Wall Soundbar System
Darryl Wilkinson  |  Jul 19, 2013

W3 On-Wall Soundbar System
Performance
Build Quality
Value

Subseries 200 Subwoofer
Performance
Features
Build Quality
Value
Price: $3,046 At A Glance: Adjustable-angle feet for tabletop or shelf mounting • Passive radiators augment bass output • W1s can be used vertically or horizontally

What do you say about a product when there’s nothing special to talk about? Let’s take, for instance, the hypothetical case of a passive LCR soundbar, a pair of matching on-wall speakers for the surrounds, and a powered subwoofer. Pretty staid and traditional stuff, that. After all, it’s a passive LCR, so there’s no extraordinary amplification technology involving cutting-edge DSP crossover and frequency manipulation in order to extract better sound out of embarrassingly small drivers than ever was possible (or desirable) before. There’s no wireless subwoofer connection to delve into, no HDMI connectivity, no onscreen display—hell, there’s not even a destined-to-disappear teeny-tiny remote control to complain about. Perhaps most disappointing from a reviewer’s perspective is the lack of any unique mess-with-your-mind faux-surround processing to wallow in the minutia of—no hyper-temporal, quasi-spatial, time-dilating series of intermodal cross-connections that takes a beautifully designed discrete multichannel soundtrack, scrambles all the elements together as if they were eggs destined for the warmed-over breakfast buffet line at Country Kitchen, but then presents it in a way that makes the end result appear (in your head) to be a delectable plate of fried eggs, sunny side up and steaming hot next to a couple of strips of crispy bacon fresh from the frying pan.

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Song From My Soundtrack
Andrew Jones on Tango: Zero Hour by Astor Piazzolla
Geoffrey Morrison  |  Jul 18, 2013

Andrew Jones is the Director of Speaker Engineering at TAD and Pioneer, and was Chief Engineer at both Infinity and KEF. He shares with us a song from his soundtrack.

"Let's face it, I'm a geek. I got into Hi-Fi because I love science and technology. I never had any doubts since my early years that I wanted to do something in the sciences, I just didn't know exactly what. Then my brother and I were given an old Dansette all in one record player and a stack of old 45's as a birthday present. Bingo! That started my obsession with both music, and the science of reproducing it.

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