Somewhere in the dim past I wrote a blog on whether or not you might want to work with a custom installer in designing and building setting up your home theater or media room. In a random search through my computer files (as messy as any physical file system on the planet!) on a different subject I came across it again. It appears to have been written for one of the newsletter in the now defunct Stereophile Guide to Home Theater/Ultimate AV. In the hope that it might be as pertinent now as it was then (given a significant update), here it is again...
Denon has reported that audio component sales, long declining, increased significantly last month (June). Not coincidentally, the company's own sales increased by double digits in the past year to the point where, in dollar sales, it holds the second place market share in the receiver/amplifier/tuner category (after Yamaha).
Thomas J. Norton | Nov 13, 2005 | First Published: Nov 14, 2005 |
And you thought it was already here. It's true that a number of films over the past few years have been digitally projected in a small number of theaters around the world, using primarily DLP technology (and occasionally LCoS). But these presentations have employed a wide range of formats. For example, 30 different release masters were reportedly made for the 30 theaters that showed <I>Van Helsing</I> digitally in 2003. This lack of standardization could never support the massive conversion to digital cinema (and the savings in print distribution costs) that the studios are hoping for.
A recent editorial in our sister publication, Stereophile, and some recent experiences I've had in dealing with Bluetooth, raised once more the related subjects of digital audio and audio compression. Digital audio can only exist by slicing the source signal up into pieces that can be manipulated and used immediately or stored for later reassembly in the analog domain.
Living as I do in a suburb of LA, it's hard to avoid movie news. The local rag, the <I>Los Angeles Times</I>, is awash in it. Its theater listings take up an entire section of the paper, which on Friday and Sunday can feature huge, double-page ads for major releases. So if a movie opens to big notices and reviews, good or bad, it's hard to avoid hearing about it around here.
If you’ve been following my writing (I know there’s at least one of you out there somewhere!) you know that I’m a major fan of packaged media. With a Blu-ray or Ultra HD Blu-ray disc I only have to buy it once and it’s always there, on the shelf, ready to access whenever I want it and offering the best of the best in both picture and sound quality. And it won’t vaporize if I want to see it again but the streaming service decides to no longer offer it...
The so-called Golden Age of Television is a bit of a moving target, but is generally thought to have run from the early 1950s to perhaps the mid 1960s. Depending on where you draw the line it began with the first mega-hit sitcom, I Love Lucy, and ended with the launch of the original ( Kirk, Spock, Bones) Star Trek.
A key characteristic of that age was the limited number of channels available. There was no home video of any kind, no way to record a show and later skip the commercials, and (at least in the '50s) black and white viewing on an enormous 21-inch (or smaller!) screen. As primitive as all that sounds, television was then the hot new entertainment technology, and the ratings for the best shows (with their limited competition) were enormous by today's standards. We might laugh today at the TV options of that era, but remember that TV nearly killed off the movies. Audiences in 2100 might well look back at what we have todayand laugh.
Our current cornucopia of options now features 99-channels of cable (and nothing to watch!), content streamed from a range of services (and over $100/month to pay for them!), and an unlimited variety of physical video discs (and yes, physical media is struggling but still far from dead).
Then there's YouTube, a free service supported by advertising.
Up until a few weeks ago I considered YouTube an Internet oddity devoted to cat videos and looney stunts...
If you find yourself experiencing a flashback on reading this blog, you're not alone. Last summer I wrote a similar piece. But there's always new ground to cover, particularly on the subject of TV setup and calibration. Some of the material here is similar to that in the prior blog, but in other ways the results are different.
An accurate calibration requires that the calibrator be trained, have access to specialized test gear and PC calibration software (of the latter, Calman from Portrait Displays is the best known and most widely used)...
<I> In this guest blog, contributor Steven Stone looks at the Algolith Flea, a $995 outboard video noise reduction box. In the blog entry following this one, I take a look at the $2995 Mosquito, Algolith's most sophisticated video noise reduction device.
A recent posting here on Sound&Vision showed a very ambitious do-it-yourself speaker built by a skilled audio enthusiast in Latvia. The finished product was originally found by us here and originated on one of the most exhaustive and impressive loudspeaker DIY websites, troelsgravesen.dk.
One question in the posting’s comments section suggested that the roughly $5000/pair cost that would go into building such speakers (not including time and labor) might be better put into buying a finished pair of $5000 speakers...