This is the classic story of boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, girl wakes up one day and realizes she loves boy and can’t live without him. Will daddy approve? Not likely since the boy comes from the group that daddy is trying to wipe off the face of the Earth, so the young couple must overcome long odds to live happily ever after. Although there’s a twist here that you don’t often see—the boy is a zombie who can’t even remember his name other than it begins with an R.
Sometimes even Batman can’t go it alone. When Poison Ivy teams with an evil alien plant-man for a scheme that could doom every human being on the planet, he first turns to Nightwing (sidekick Robin, now all grown up), but even that’s not enough. Their best hope of stopping these baddies in time is to team with Ivy’s lone confidante, Harley Quinn.
AT A GLANCE Plus
Free app from Roon Labs
Wired and wireless multiroom playback options
Impressive sound from built-in DAC
Minus
Track count limited to 30,000
Requires wired LAN
connection
THE VERDICT
Elac’s Discovery provides a simple, elegant option for adding a networked music server with Roon to an existing audio system.
Before diving into a review of Elac’s Discovery DS-S101-G music server, it seems apt to ask: What is a music server? In the past, it was a standalone audio component with a built-in hard disk that stored and played a ripped CD collection while connecting to the internet to fetch metadata. While products that fit this description still exist, a music server can also be something as basic as a software application running on a computer or on a network-attached storage (NAS) appliance. The server application, wherever it may reside, acts as a librarian for your digital audio files, sorting and retrieving them, and then routing the data to a USB DAC or a networked audio component that translates the ones and zeros into music.
Q What receivers can power a Dolby Atmos 7.1.4 home theater? I plan to pair the receiver with a tower-based Definitive Technology BP9000 series speaker system and use that company’s A90 Atmos Enabled speaker modules for overhead effects. —Waymon French
When the phrase “beast mode” entered the vernacular, it was intended mainly as a descriptor for a singularly focused level of energy and drive as exhibited by certain football players. But it just as easily could have been used to describe the laser focus Def Leppard displayed in the face of innumerable odds while recording the 1987 juggernaut known as Hysteria. It may have taken them 34 months of on/off studio time and a hefty price tag of 2 million pounds to get to the finish line, but the ensuing album sold over 25 million copies worldwide and became the defining sonic template for the scores of pop-metal crossover hybrids that followed.
HiFiMan today introduced a slimmed down version of its $50,000 flagship Shangri-La electrostatic headphone system that “maintains the predecessor’s wide, natural soundstage in a leaner and lighter package.”