LATEST ADDITIONS

CinemaStyle
Star-Studded Decor
Michelle McCarthy  |  Jul 02, 2013
Your favorite celebrities and movie characters need not be strictly relegated to the big screen in your home theater. With life-size cardboard cutouts, you have yet another choice when it comes to decorating ideas.
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Custom Installation How-To
Review: Astell&Kern AK100 Portable Music Player
Daniel Kumin  |  Jul 02, 2013

First, the obvious: The Astell&Kern AK100 is beautiful, both visually and in tactile terms, much the same way as the first iPod you ever saw was. Who cares what it is or what it does? You just want to hold it. And own it.

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Audio Video News
Streaming TV Productions Proliferate
Mark Fleischmann  |  Jul 01, 2013
Online streaming outfits are turning themselves into studios, bankrolling movies and TV series. Before you scoff, did you watch Netflix’s House of Cards? We did, blasting through all 13 episodes in the first month of availability. The series, with Kevin Spacey as a Machiavellian congressman, has made 86 percent of Netflix subscribers less likely to cancel, says a Cowen and Co. survey. We can’t wait for the second “season.”
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Brazil
Shane Buettner  |  Jul 01, 2013
Picture
Sound
Extras
Interactivity
Few films are worthy of a movie about the movie, but director Terry Gilliam’s 1985 dystopian fantasy Brazil is among the legendary few. A flawed but inspired masterpiece, the film remains a Hollywood cautionary tale for the standoff between Gilliam and Universal’s then-chief Sid Sheinberg, who refused to release the film and even ordered a sappy, discordant re-edit that excised some 40 minutes from Gilliam’s original cut. In retrospect, the heavy-handed efforts of Universal’s “black tower” to wrest artistic control from Gilliam only underscored Brazil’s anti-totalitarian satire and unwittingly aided its underground success.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
Peter Pan
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jul 01, 2013
Picture
Sound
Extras
Interactivity
Written by novelist and playwright J.M. Barrie and produced as a London stage play in 1904, Peter Pan has become a timeless classic, finding its way onto stage, screen, and television. But it’s this 1953 Disney film that defines the story for most modern audiences.
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Vote
What’s your take on 3DTV?
HT Staff  |  Jul 01, 2013
The recent announcement that ESPN is shuttering its 3D channel at the end of the year is raising questions about interest in 3DTV. What’s your take on 3D? If you're a fan, tell us about your favorite 3D movies and programs. And if you're not a fan, tell us why you don't like it.
What’s your take on 3DTV?
I love it! My TV has passive 3D capability and I watch movies in 3D all the time
4% (63 votes)
I love it! My TV has active 3D capability (with battery-powered glasses) and I watch movies in 3D all the time
9% (159 votes)
I couldn’t care less… My TV has passive 3D capability but I never use it
4% (72 votes)
I couldn’t care less… My TV has active 3D capability (with battery-powered glasses) but I never use it
12% (213 votes)
It’s okay… My TV has passive 3D capability and I occasionally watch 3D movies
4% (77 votes)
It’s okay… My TV has active 3D capability (with battery-powered glasses) and I occasionally watch 3D movies
16% (277 votes)
3D glasses drive me crazy
5% (93 votes)
I don’t care about 3D one way or the other
45% (785 votes)
Total votes: 1739
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Headphone Reviews
Review: Westone ADV Alpha
Brent Butterworth  |  Jun 30, 2013

The companies that have most benefitted from the headphone boom are the ones who are great at marketing but don't know much about audio engineering. (Yet.) Two of the hottest brands in the biz are Beats and Skullcandy, companies that didn't even exist when the iPod debuted.

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Remotely Possible
Soundcast’s Melody Makes Music in the Round Anywhere
Darryl Wilkinson  |  Jun 29, 2013
Portable Bluetooth speakers are a dime a dozen; and, based on the way they sound, that’s about all some of them are worth. Good portable Bluetooth speakers are much more difficult to find. Really good portable Bluetooth speakers that are also weather-resistant and include a long-lasting, built-in rechargeable battery – heck, while we’re at it, let’s include that they’re not ultra-techie-looking, too – are about as easy to come across as a Big Foot cavorting through the woods wearing a bikini.

Soundcast Systems, the people who make the outstanding OutCast and OutCast Jr., dynamic duo of weather-resistant, wireless, transportable speakers, have been hinting for months about a new portable Bluetooth speaker that they think is so much better than anything else on the market that it’s more than simply the equivalent of finding a Big Foot in a bikini, it’s more akin to stumbling across a bikini-clad Big Foot pole dancing in a forest clearing. (What Soundcast actually claims is that Melody is “What other Bluetooth speakers want to be when they grow up.” Okay, that’s cool. But I think my pole-dancing Big Foot mental image is a more memorable.)

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A/V Veteran
Upscaling to 4K
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jun 29, 2013
Despite all the talk about 4K (or Ultra HD) displays, there are already a bazillion hours of “standard” 2K HD programming out there in videoland. Consumer 4K sources will be slow in coming, and they might well arrive over the Internet. The question remains as to whether or not the inherent data rate limitations of streaming video could dilute or eliminate the supposed benefits of 4K resolution—apart from the marketing hype.

Over the next couple of years, therefore, and assuming that 4K sets take fire in the marketplace, the smart money will be on upconverting 2K sources to 4K. No form of upconverting can add real resolution; genuine Ultra HD starts and ends with 4K resolution. Nevertheless, we expect plenty of action on the 2K to 4K upconversion front. Since consumer 2K is largely (though not entirely) 1920 x 1080 pixels, and consumer 4K is 3840 x 2160, it would appear that such upconversion might simply involve taking the content of each 2K pixel and quadrupling it (with no added enhancement) to fill a 2 x 2 pixel area on the 4K display. But that will gain nothing in subjective resolution, and may actually reduce image quality due to the added processing required. Most upconversion, therefore, will likely include enhancement and/or other digital manipulation, designed to both eliminate possible upconversion losses and better simulate the look of true 4K.

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3D Projector ReviewsProjector Reviews
BenQ W1070 3D DLP Projector
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jun 28, 2013
2D Performance
3D Performance
Features
Ergonomics
Value
Price: $1,000 At A Glance: Stunning brightness • Good color and detail • Mediocre black level and contrast

While our subject here is the W1070 home theater projector from BenQ, there’s more than a little business projector DNA in its genes. How else to explain a single-chip DLP design that’s a third the size and weight of most dedicated home theater models, has built-in audio with grim but usable mono sound, is equipped with a “digital zoom” that magnifies the image within the frame set by the standard zoom control (just the thing for a close examination of that quarterly profit and loss spreadsheet), still offers an S-video input, and has a relatively close-throw lens with a significant vertical offset?

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