Editor's Eye

Two close-together and closely aligned recent announcements about the flat-panel TV business really got me reflecting on how much that world has changed…and is changing again.

I recently enjoyed an early press tour of Panasonic’s soon-to-open Innovation Center in Newark, NJ, an open-windowed retail-like space off the lobby of the company’s new headquarters building. I’m not usually much for these types of dog-and-pony shows, and little of what the company shared that day was directly related to the consumer electronics audio/video segment that’s of prime interest to our readers. But I’ve covered the firm’s CE technology for decades now, and this move from their old Secaucus, NJ campus...

Hold your index finger up to the air for a moment. Can you feel that? It’s the fresh breeze of good sound wafting ever so gently across the horizon.

After years of living in a desert of low-res MP3s, crappy white ear buds, wafer-thin flat-panel TV speakers pointed away from the listener (come on!), and increasingly anemic AVRs, there is a revolution afoot.

Shanghai, for me, is literally halfway ‘round the world. Some 20 hours flying time from New York, it is 12 hours ahead in time zones and across the International Dateline: the very definition of “Tomorrowland.” The post-modern, sci-fi landscape of the Pudong section of China’s biggest trade center and most cosmopolitan city does little to deter that notion. Bound on one side by the 128-story Shanghai Tower and on the other by the Oriental Pearl, a futuristic, 1,500 foot broadcast tower, it looks like a bold experiment in animation made concrete, a slice of society that has, to date, only been imagined for amusement parks. On first sight I could only gasp at both the scale and shape of it, then grew silent with respect for not just the accomplishment, but the gutsy vision it must have took to start it.

Home video streaming received a boost in 2020 for obvious reasons, while movie theater attendance took a dive for equally obvious reasons. But even with a massive paradigm shift in the way people experience movies and other forms of entertainment clearly taking place in real time, it still came as a shock when WarnerMedia announced in early December that its full slate of theatrical releases for 2021 would drop day and date on the company’s HBO Max streaming service.

A persistent theme I’ve observed in recent articles from several long-time Sound & Vision contributors is a sense of unease over the encroachment of AI (Artificial Intelligence) into the traditional consumer electronics space.