TECH2

They say that when everyone’s hip to a trend, it’s no longer hip.

Hanging out at the recent Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, I listened in on a conversation that S+V writer Mike Trei was having with an audio manufacturer who’s getting into the headphone biz.

I predict that 2011 will be for audio what 1962 was for the art world. In 1962, Andy Warhol’s first solo shows in Los Angeles and New York swept away the prevailing aesthetic ethos of the era, demonstrating to the world that a Brillo pad box could be a work of art.

Visitors to the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest that ended yesterday got to see two shows in one.

Somehow when I was walking around last month’s CEDIA Expo, I completely missed what must surely be the biggest, baddest, most expensive in-wall speaker ever created.

A five-year-old surround-sound receiver has all the appeal of a five-year-old banana. But a five-year-old (or even 25-year-old) stereo amplifier might sound and perform every bit as good as one built last month.

At the party last night at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood to celebrate the release of the Blu-ray Disc and DVD of Dexter, Season 5, I got to spend some quality time with Craig Eggers, Director of Blu-ray Ecosystems for Dolby Labs. Eggers was there because the Blu-ray release is in Dolby TrueHD 5.1. I think I was supposed to talk with him about the new discs, but instead I cornered him for an update on something far more interesting to me: the status of 7.1 sound.