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Audio Video News
Sony's Stringer
SV Staff  |  Aug 05, 2008
Sony is one of the most recognized, and respected, corporate names in the world. How many Sony products do you have at home? But when's the last time you bought a Sony product? The electronics juggernaut struggled to cope with monumental...
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The Big Picture
Investing in Yourself
Scott Wilkinson  |  Aug 05, 2008

I got home from my THX adventure on Saturday, after three <I>long</I> days of hard-core tech training in a darkened room while the most perfect weather I can imagine beckoned just beyond the walls. But it was worth it&#151;although I already knew most of the material, I did learn a number of useful things, and I got to observe the course itself to see what aspiring calibrators can expect if they take it.

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Audio Video News
Satellite Providers Step Up HD Offerings
Mark Fleischmann  |  Aug 05, 2008
Both DirecTV and the Dish Network announced last week that they would offer viewers more HD channels. Dish also announced it would do video on demand in 1080p.
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Audio Video News
SoundSense's Active Noise-canceling System
SV Staff  |  Aug 05, 2008
We all know and love noise-canceling headphones. Who can bear to fly without them, right? Now, imagine that same technology used in your home theater? Come on, who here has a completely acoustically quiet home theater? Between air-conditioners,...
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Audio Video News
Netflix Sticking to Subscription Strategy
SV Staff  |  Aug 04, 2008
It seems like an interesting game. All the major players in the home-video market are jockeying for position - trying to position themselves in the one location that will remain viable in the future. Netflix is sticking to what they know best....
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Bookshelf Speaker Reviews
Avalon NP Evolution 1.0 Speaker System
Mark Fleischmann  |  Aug 04, 2008
Rocky Mountain high.

One of my formative experiences as an audiophile was a visit to Michael Hobson’s showroom in a New York Soho loft. This was before Mike started Classic Records. He was selling Avalon loudspeakers and Jeff Rowland Design Group amps and preamps. How well I recall the floorstanding Avalon Ascent, fed via Cardas cables by two Rowland Model Ones operating as monoblocks. Hobson put on the adagio from Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto performed by Rudolf Serkin. I went on to buy the amp and collect all of Serkin’s Beethoven piano concerto recordings.

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Blu-ray Player Reviews
Blu-ray’s Identity Crisis
Joshua Zyber  |  Aug 04, 2008
Can Blu-ray be more than the next Laserdisc?

Although I don’t usually pay attention to such things, the other day as I was opening a recent Blu-ray purchase, I took note of the “Compatible with PlayStation 3” sticker that either the studio or the retailer had attached to the shrink wrap. It was trivial, hardly worth glancing at, but it got me thinking about how closely the Blu-ray format is tied to Sony’s multipurpose game console. Of course, I seem to recall similar stickers about the PlayStation 2 appearing on early DVD releases, but the situation is very different now. DVD’s benefits over its VHS and Laserdisc predecessors were so obvious that the format achieved explosive growth, and its success was never dependent on just one playback machine. Certainly, the PS2 brought DVD into a lot of homes very quickly, but standalone players and computer drives were equally (and soon more) popular with the public. Everyone wanted DVD, whether they wanted a game console to go with it or not.

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Audio Video News
British Gov't and ISPs Attack P2P
Mark Fleischmann  |  Aug 04, 2008
The fight against illegal music downloading is taking some strange turns in Great Britain. Internet service providers have agreed to send letters accusing customers of stealing music. And the government has set a goal of reducing illegal file sharing by up to 80 percent within three years.
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Audio Video News
Alas, Cassettes, We Hardly Knew Ye
SV Staff  |  Aug 04, 2008
I regret to inform you of the passing of the Compact Cassette. At the age of 45 (that's about 135 in technology years) the cassette finally succumbed to market forces. Cause of death, tragically, was the cassette's own offspring, the Compact Disc....
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
The Jack Ryan Collection
David Vaughn  |  Aug 03, 2008

<IMG SRC="/images/archivesart/redoctober.jpg" WIDTH=200 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT>Jack Ryan is the central character in 12 of Tom Clancy's novels about the CIA analyst. When the debut book, <i>The Hunt for Red October</i>, hit the silver screen in 1990, a relatively unknown actor, Alec Baldwin, starred as Ryan in what was to become the first of many adaptations from the successful literary series. But a combination of factors&#151;a new studio head at Paramount, some bad press about Baldwin and Kim Basinger on the set of <i>Marrying Man</i>, and the availability of superstar Harrison Ford, led to the replacement of Baldwin in <i>Patriot Games</i> and <i>Clear and Present Danger</i> with Ford in the lead role.

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