Power amps get little respect in the home theater world. They're the heavy, black (or silver) boxes that sit somewhere in the dark, serving your speakers with a generous supply of power.
If you've been reading <I>UAV's</I> reviews you know that while 1080p displays are proliferating, the ability of these displays to actually accept a 1080p native signal is a rarity. And if you've been following our coverage of the next-gen disc formats you also know that DTS and Dolby have cooked up new audio formats that aren't based on the lossy compression schemes we've been living with on DVD for years. All of these developments are intertwined with the HDMI specs, as HDMI will be the carrier for both 1080p video and the new audio codecs. Here's the latest on what it all means.
Getting the best picture resolution remains one of the chief goals of HDTV shoppers. But as I explained in last month's "Tech Talk," human visual acuity limits how much detail you can see in any image, live or onscreen.
Like swimmers in some Darwinian gene pool, DVD recorders are quickly mutating to fill every possible niche. Yet as they evolve, you can count on finding a core set of features in most decks - a TV tuner, a VCR-style timer, and a handful of recording "modes" that let you trade picture quality for playback time.
Considering the rapid way A/V technology evolves, I'll bet Charles Darwin would have been a Sound & Vision subscriber. And survival of the fittest and natural selection are definitely alive and well in my equipment rack. In fact, all you have to do is look at it to see the history of recorded video at a glance.
Speaker maker JBL is just one part of the Harman International family, but for a brand that makes up only a single slice of a large pie, it has an incredibly diverse product mix. Along with home theater speakers, JBL makes systems for music-recording and film sound-mixing studios, movie theaters, concert halls, computers, and cars.
