It was the most ambitious do-it-yourself carpentry work I've done in five years, ever since I covered the windows in my home theater studio to shut out the light and minimize extraneous outside sounds. The latest project involved building a false wall directly in front of an existing wall, not only to conveniently hang an expected ongoing parade of flat panel displays coming in for review, but also to facilitate a planned series of on-wall speaker reviews. There's no question that on-wall speakers are a significant trend, and one that we can't continue to ignore here at <I>Ultimate AV</I>. As for in-walls, well, that's a project for the future.
I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore. Follow the yellow brick road. And your little dog, too! I’m melting! Ding dong the witch is dead. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
The Wizard of Oz has likely contributed as much to the American lexicon as anything prior to Star Trek. (Just kidding though “I’m giving ‘er all she’s got, Capt’n, He’s dead, Jim, Engage, Fascinating, Make it so, and I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer” do have their loyal fans.) The movie wasn’t a huge hit when it first opened in 1939, but it made up for it years later, particularly starting in the 1950s when it became an annual TV event.
Thiel Audio normally displays at the Venetian Hotel, the venue for specialty audio. But this year they elected to have a booth on the main floor of the Convention center. It was obviously not a spot for an effective, active demo, but the new, 4-way Thiel 40.3, at $35,000/pair, is a big step up in price for the company...
The subject of the Titanic disaster makes for endless commentary. The ship went down in 1912, but once it was precisely located on the ocean floor in the 1980s the story of its demise has inspired an orgy of new coverage. The star attraction of that coverage, of course, was, and remains, the 1997 James Cameron film, Titanic. But it wasn't the first, or only, film on the subject. There was the 1958 black and white British film A Night to Remember, based on the Walter Lord book of the same name.
I’ve long been a fan of the Titanic saga, well before the 1997 film. I loved that one, but mainly for the stunning effects and James Horner’s magnificent score, not the badly written soap opera that took up over half of its running time. This week it returned to my attention, partly because in a few days the 107th anniversary of the disaster will arrive (April 15, though no one typically commemorates such an odd number) and partly because last week I re-watched a story of the Titanic on Blu-ray as one of the sources I used for a product review.
The latter however, wasn’t James Cameron’s flawed but still compelling epic. Instead, Titanic: Blood & Steel is a 12-part mini-series, released in 2012 (the 100th anniversary of the sinking, about the building of the ship. It doesn’t address the sinking at all. In fact, it ends just as the ship steams out of Belfast, where she was built (A ship is always a she, and as the narrative makes clear, she’s a ship, not a boat!)
I always find it odd when they refer to movie <I>previews</I> (what everyone I knew called them when I was growing up in Connecticut) as <I>trailers</I>. Trailers (okay, I surrender) are mini movies, assembled for one purpose: to put asses (pun not…oh, never mind) in the seats for the film itself.
An unexpected copy of the 4K Ultra HD release of Transformers: The Last Knight flew over my transom last week. This fifth entry may well set a new bar for mindless action punctuated by cringe-worthy humor but it's filled with exceptional eye candy...
So you’ve got plans to go over the river and through the woods for that sleep-inducing turkey dinner. But the day won’t be complete without you later getting as bloated on football as on the banquet stuffing. After the feast everyone will sit down to see the MaciNacs of Mackenna Tech take on the Okidokes of Northwest Virginia A&T.
But as soon as you sit down in front of the TV you see something amiss. The Nacs and Dokes, normally the smallest players in the Little 7 Conference, look like wide-bodied extras from Lord of the Dwarfs: The Return of Gimli (I hope I’m not giving Peter Jackson any ideas).
You, our hawkeyed video purist, spots the problem immediately...
With apologies to Samsung and a few others who haven’t made the OLED plunge, and show no signs of doing so, OLED remains today’s hottest flat screen technology. But the battle continues as UHDTV manufacturers scramble to take the next big technological leap. That will likely be Micro LED...
The discussion here was inspired by a letter from a reader. He noted that in a recent review I mentioned that the set in question offered auto calibration. But the remainder of the letter suggested that my comment was misunderstood (or perhaps not precise enough to begin with). In the review/calibration/video-crazy business world, auto-cal refers to a specialized subroutine in a standard calibration program such as Calman from Portrait Displays. A different version of this subroutine exists for each brand/model of TV, and perhaps even for each year of each brand/model. Once set up it's fast and accurate. But this auto-cal requires the same expensive test gear and calibrator training as any manual calibration...
In TV Tech Explained: Mind Your Gamma I covered gamma and its importance for playback of standard dynamic range (SDR) video. But high dynamic range (HDR) is a new and very different animal.
Unless you're accustomed to turning on your new set and never touching any of the controls beyond volume (and if you're reading this that's probably not you) Gamma is a control and a subject worth knowing more about.