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Audio Video News
Netflix Raises Prices of Standard and Premium Plans
SV Staff  |  Oct 09, 2017
Netflix has raised pricing on two of its three subscription plans.
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Audio Video News
Hollywood Exec Has Grand Plan to Reinvent TV
SV Staff  |  Oct 06, 2017
Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chairman of Walt Disney Studios and co-founder of DreamWorks Animation, has a grand scheme to reinvent TV for mobile viewers.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Straw Dogs
Josef Krebs  |  Oct 06, 2017
Picture
Sound
Extras
From the get-go in this hugely provocative and highly challenging essay on violence, there’s a disconcerting, menacing montage of images that tilts you off balance. The setting is a small, insular, isolated, Wicker Man–ish Cornish community where Deliverance-like locals sit and wait.
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Blu-ray Movie ReviewsUltra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews
F8: Fate of the Furious
Corey Gunnestad  |  Oct 06, 2017
Picture
Sound
Extras
I never understood why MI-6 always gave James Bond the most expensive and exotic sports cars on the planet to take with him on his missions. Q Branch must know by now there’s no way in hell that thing is coming back in one piece. That same basic logic applies to the Fast & the Furious films: Why would you ever give a Lamborghini to someone who’s going to a demolition derby?
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Audio Video NewsNew Products
Focal Launches Lower-Priced Reference Headphones
SV Staff  |  Oct 06, 2017
Focal, the French manufacturer of speakers and headphones, today introduced a new lower-prices set of open-back circumaural headphones aimed at audiophiles.
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Ears On
The Little Book That Could
Mark Fleischmann  |  Oct 06, 2017
It has been seven years since I last wrote a blog shamelessly promoting my book Practical Home Theater: A Guide to Video and Audio Systems. In fact, I've never told the whole story of why I wrote the book, why I update it every year, and why it's lasted so long—the latest edition, dated 2018, is the 17th. Addicted as I am to numbers divisible by five, I might have waited for the 20th edition. But this blog is long overdue. Think of it as a delayed reaction to the 15th.

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Audio Video News
Recording Academy Addresses Lack of Production Standards for Hi-Res Music
SV Staff  |  Oct 06, 2017
The Producers & Engineers Wing of the Recording Academy will present new guidelines for hi-res music production at the upcoming AES New York Convention as part of its continuing efforts to deliver music to consumers in its highest quality form.
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Audio Video NewsNew Products
NAD Reimagines a Classic Amp
SV Staff  |  Oct 05, 2017
NAD today announced that it will ship an integrated amplifier in November that recalls one of the most famous amps in audio history: the NAD 3020, introduced in 1978.
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Projection Screen Reviews
Stewart Filmscreen Phantom HALR Ambient Light Rejecting Screen Review
Michael P. Hamilton  |  Oct 05, 2017
Performance
Setup
Value
PRICE $4,132 as reviewed

AT A GLANCE
Plus
Excellent off-axis light rejection
Wide viewing angle maintains color saturation
Very good calibration accuracy
Minus
Cloudy artifacts with camera pans on bright scenes
High price

THE VERDICT
A paradoxical hybrid that blends excellent contrast management for challenging viewing environments with a frustrating callousness about pristine image fidelity.

Two years ago, Sound & Vision contemplated how pairing sub-$2K projectors with innovative ALR (ambient light rejecting) screens might compete as similarly priced replacements for large flat panels in multipurpose environments. Compelling, immersive, life-size projected images for the same currency swap as a diminutive, backlit, uh…TV?

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Throwback Thursday
Flashback 1982: World's First CD Player Arrives
SV Staff  |  Oct 05, 2017
A momentous occasion in the history of consumer electronics took place 34 years ago this week when Sony offered the CDP-101 for sale in Japan.
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