Toshiba is apparently going to attempt to swamp the market with HD DVD players ahead of the arrival in stores of standalone Blu-ray disc players or PlayStation 3, but is taking a high-risk route in doing so. The HD DVD developer and backer reached an agreement with and licensed their technology to Chinese manufacturers, opening the door to inexpensive players and the kind of price wars that have turned current standard definition DVD players into ubiquitous commodity items.
The real prize in my two-channel system, at least the prize du jour, is the resurrection of the Stax SRX headphones and SRD-7 headphone amplifier. Well, it’s not really an amplifier, just a transformer. You wire it to the output of your real amplifier with these pretty cheesy (at least by audiophile standards) wires that are hard-soldered inside the unit. Then you screw down your beefier audiophile speaker cable (or in my case, the equally cheesy Radio Shack 16 gauge) to the terminals provided on the back of the SRD-7 and use a switch on the front panel to choose between headphones or speakers.
One other thing that I want to talk about in this space is HD TV shows. While I won't force anyone to watch some of the movies I watch, I do however know good TV. One of the most distressing aspects of television watching is falling in love with a show, only to have it cancelled by an incompetent network (Firefly) or lack of viewers (tons of shows). So occasionally I'm going to put up a few shows that you should check out, if you haven't already. With few exceptions, they'll be HD, or at least widescreen. Trust me, if I'm watching them, they're worth watching.
The DVD of <I>Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith</I> hits the video stores this week. Fox didn't send us an advanced screener. Perhaps they read the rather negative review I wrote last summer during the film's <A HREF="http://www.guidetohometheater.com/thomasjnorton/505tjn/index1.html">thea... release</A>! I'll have more to say about the movie, and about the DVD release, in the upcoming November 2005 <I>UAV</I> eNewsletter, scheduled to be mailed out next week. You do subscribe, don't you? (If not, simply <A HREF="http://www.ultimateavmag.com/newsletter_subscribe/?Your%20E-mail"> click here</A> to sign up. It's free.)
When we added the addition that contains the office to our house in 1990, I had the wherewithal to run speaker wires from the built-in nook in the office to the opposite wall. The idea was to put the stereo in the alcove and not have wires showing. I knew enough to use Radio Shack’s finest 16-gauge copper. Of course, I never actually <i>used </i>the wires or the nook. There was always some interesting high-end cable being proffered, and I’m only human. Besides, the speakers and equipment were out on display in the reviewing room, not meant to be hidden in an alcove.
I guess I should welcome you all to my blog. Does anyone actually read these things? I guess I’ll find out. Being the Video Editor, I’ll take this space to babble on about all things video. Certainly hardware will take up a big chunk of blog space, but I’ll also talk about HD program material, video games, and anything else you can put up on a big screen. I’ll try to make this space as informative and fun to read as possible, but seeing as I have a hard enough time being interesting once a month in the magazine, doing it once a week should be. . . well, we shall see.
<I>UAV</I> readers have been flooded with so much news lately about the transition to HDTV- with respect to both the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray format war, and this country's transition to digital TV broadcast- that I almost feel bad bringing this one up. But it's true- in late October Warner Bros. began field trials of digital cinema presentations in Japan featuring so-called 4K resolution, which is, gulp, an image with a pixel count of 4096x2160.
