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Headphone Reviews
Review: Paradigm Shift E3m
Brent Butterworth  |  Jun 25, 2012

Paradigm tunes its IEMs to match the sound of its different speaker lines. The E3m is the top-of-the-line model, thus it is said to match the company’s top-of-the-line Signature Series speakers. The midpriced E2m matches Paradigm’s Studio Series speakers, and the low-priced E1 matches the Monitor Series 7 speakers.

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Headphone Reviews
Review: Bowers & Wilkins C5
Brent Butterworth  |  Jun 25, 2012

If you’re sick of trying to choose among dozens of lookalike IEMs in the racks at electronics stores, you’ll find the C5 to be welcome relief. This IEM resembles nothing else on the market. The back of each titanium earpiece holds B&W’s Micro Porous Filter, a layer of hundreds of tiny steel balls that the company says works as a sonic diffuser.

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Headphone Reviews
Review: Polk Audio UltraFocus 6000
Brent Butterworth  |  Jun 25, 2012

I’m happy to see Polk getting into one of the headphone world’s neglected nether realms: noise-canceling IEMs. The UltraFocus 6000 gives you the easy transportability of an IEM with the noise-canceling technology that’s popular on larger over-ear and on-ear models.

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Headphone Reviews
Review: PSB M4U 2
Brent Butterworth  |  Jun 25, 2012

When PSB’s Paul Barton recently called me to chat about headphone measurement, it soon became apparent that he’d read every scientific paper ever written about headphones. The first headphone to which Barton brings his ultra-scientific approach is the M4U 2, a noise-canceling model poised to go up against the likes of the Bose QC15.

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Headphone Reviews
Review: Velodyne vPulse
Brent Butterworth  |  Jun 25, 2012

Subwoofer specialist company Velodyne surprised everyone when it entered the headphone business last year. But while you might expect Velodyne’s headphones to incorporate ginormous drivers, passive radiators, high-powered digital amps, and the like, the vPulse is pretty ordinary-looking.

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Headphone Reviews
Review: Altec Lansing Muzx Ultra MZX606
Brent Butterworth  |  Jun 25, 2012

With so many companies slapping their brand on generic IEMS, what’s an easy way to tell who’s serious about sound? Look to the guys selling IEMs with balanced armatures. Most IEMs use dynamic drivers, tiny versions of the drivers in box speakers, but a balanced armature is more like a little motorized teeter-totter that drives a diaphragm.

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Tech2
Popcornflix: Free Streaming Movies
 |  Jun 25, 2012

The annoying thing about Internet-connected smart TVs? Accessing the smarts usually costs you bucks. Probably 95% of the streaming Internet video I watch on my Samsung flat-panel is Netflix ($7.99 a month) or Vudu (usually $4.99 per movie for 720p high-def).

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Vote
Will You See Brave in a Dolby Atmos Theater?
Scott Wilkinson  |  Jun 22, 2012
Brave is the new animated feature from Disney and Pixar that opens today across the country. Of course, any new Pixar movie is cause for excitement, but this one is doubly so as the first movie with a soundtrack mixed for the Dolby Atmos cinema sound system, which places speakers all around the audience as well as overhead, creating a truly 3-dimensional soundfield. (For more on Dolby Atmos, click here; for my coverage of the world premier of Brave, click here.)

With any new technology, the only way to gauge its importance is to experience it for yourself. On the other hand, new technologies are often not widely available at first—Atmos has been installed in only 14 theaters around the country—making it difficult for most moviegoers to hear it firsthand. But for those who live near one of these theaters, this is an opportunity to hear what could be the next generation in movie sound.

Do you live near an Atmos theater? (Click here for a list of theaters and locations.) If so, will you make an effort to see Brave there? How far are you willing to go? HT reader Jarod and his wife are driving four hours! Or do you plan to skip the movie altogether? If you do see it in an Atmos theater, let us know your impressions of the system in the comments.

Vote to see the results and leave a comment about your choice.

Will You See Brave in a Dolby Atmos Theater?
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Ask S&V
Bass Management in Blu-ray Player
Scott Wilkinson  |  Jun 22, 2012
I am contemplating a 4.0 setup with two subs in the left and right front speakers using just the bass management of an Oppo BDP-95 Blu-ray player. If I set the left and right front speakers to Large, is the LFE channel redirected and divided between the left and right front channels? Can the center channel be totally re-directed and divided between left and right front? If the surround and back left and right speakers are set to Small, can the low frequencies from those channels be re-directed to the left and right front? Finally, can all these conditions be met simultaneously?

Michael Soderback

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Tech2
Microsoft Surface: to iPad or not to iPad, that is the Question
Geoffrey Morrison  |  Jun 22, 2012

To a surprising amount of excitement, Microsoft announced the a pair of new tablets this week. Web reactions to the new Surface — as you’d expect — were split down party lines: “It’s not an iPad! It’s stupid!” and “It’s not an iPad! It’s the second coming!”

Reality, as usual, is somewhere in the middle. It’s possible the Surface is a worthy iPad competitor something that, so far, we have not seen.

It all comes down to one, seemingly simple, thing...

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