Wide Angle

Ever wonder why there are so many great Canadian speaker companies? Here’s one reason: government intervention. Canada’s government-sponsored National Research Council, which, among other things, facilitates research in the fields of speaker measurement, signal processing, and noise control, has proven to be a breeding ground for speaker design.

The 2002 film version of Spider-Man was a success on many levels, but most of its magic can be attributed to director Sam Raimi (he of Evil Dead fame), who put his distinctive visual stamp on the production. Spider-Man is also perfectly cast, with Tobey Maguire playing a wide-eyed Peter Parker, Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane, and Willem Dafoe chewing up the screen as Spider-Man nemesis Green Goblin.

It apparently was necessary for Friedrich to reformat the original NASA 8K footage because it wouldn’t play on the Samsung 8K TV that he initially tried it with. Why not? According to Friedrich, “The whole encoding was not optimized for playback with CE-devices: wrong video levels, incompatible MPEG profile, critical bitrate.”

As an A/V connection standard, HDMI has its downsides: limited cable length, glitches, slow switching, and version upgrades that make new gear incompatible with old stuff — the list goes on. But a major upside is that one interconnect can handle the jobs previously carried out by a thick wad of cables. In its most current version, HDMI 1.4, a single link will convey high-def video/multichannel audio, link devices to a local network (HDMI Ethernet Channel), and route audio signals from a TV back out to an A/V receiver  (Audio Return Channel). Sweet!

But any TV making the hook-up also needs to be plugged into a power socket. That means an additional wire, plus the logistical problem of locating a TV near an AC outlet — or, for a wall-mounted installation, of embedding one within the wall (a task that generally requires the services of an electrician). Wouldn’t it be great if HDMI also carried power?

HDMI can’t. But HDBaseT can.

Back before the development of 33 1/3-rpm vinyl records (those things that DJ types and a few of us here at Sound+Vision collect) and CDs, people used to listen to music using something called the 78, a 10-inch disc format that spun at 78 revolutions per minute and was made from a variety of materials during its lifespan, including rubber, shellac, and, ultimately, vin