If you ever wonder what the geeks at Sound & Vision do when we’re not listening to new speakers or tuning up video displays, well, we’re probably debating some arcane technical detail that most non-enthusiast mortals would neither understand nor care about. And so it was that a rather fired-up exchange of e-mails occurred recently between myself, video technical editor Tom Norton, and our contributing technical editor Kris Deering.
Last June, I was invited to a press tour and demo of a new IMAX VR Experience Center in New York City. The company best known for entertaining big audiences with big screens had created a space in the lobby of a popular AMC multiplex on Manhattan’s East Side to deliver one-on-one virtual reality entertainment to walk-in customers. It was their second such facility, after a standalone pilot location in Los Angeles.
I love that time of year when, after a couple of false starts and brief teases, the persistence of winter finally breaks for good and the soft breezes of spring arrive. That’s a decidedly northern experience, of course, one that some folks eventually move south to get away from permanently (well, the winter that precedes it, anyway), and which others have never known because of their origins in warmer climes. I get it — I’ve got family all over the country and have spent plenty of time out west and in Florida, and I see how a guy could get used to it. But the New Yorker in me thinks those folks are missing out. If you haven’t struggled through a winter, even a mild one, you can’t fully appreciate the fleeting beauty of a spring and summer in the same way. You need that frame of reference. It makes being outside that much better.
In what appears to be an ongoing trend, LG took top honors Thursday at this year's TV Shootout at CE Week in New York. This marks the 4th consecutive year that LG's current top OLED model, this time the 65-inch E7, was declared the annual "King of TV" — a title even more deserving than in year's past thanks to the set sweeping all three of the judging categories.
But despite what by now seems like a familiar or expected result, this year's event was more competitive and interesting than in recent years, with at least one set that very nearly equaled the LG, and others that failed to come as close as we'd have expected.
In a recent post I chided manufacturers for releasing Wi-Fi-based speakers that failed to perform reliably. But then I began to wonder about the role of our Wi-Fi networks and whether the demands of these new products are outpacing the capabilities of today’s “average” network. Ravi Rajapakse, founder and CEO of Blackfire Research, sheds some light on the subject…
The company best known among cinephiles for entertaining big audiences with big screens and big sound has gone the opposite way with its latest big idea: Virtual reality (VR) centers to provide one-on-one entertainment to walk-in customers at cineplexes and other venues nationwide.
As night settled in with hours left to drive, I pulled off the highway in Barstow to tap the Wi-Fi at Starbucks and download the Audible version of Fear and Loathing to my iPhone. That’s when I saw him, working behind the counter, his wild gray hair dancing in the overhead lights...
If something seems off-kilter in your life—for example, you've been feeling alienated and isolated from your family, or you're wondering why you're not having enough sex—Sonos thinks it may have found the answer.
In last year's annual AV receiver issue, I pondered the future of the AVR and whether it might just become a relic; a big black box rusting in the heap at the Ol’ Tech landfill, its unruly interconnects and speaker cables still clinging on for dear life and aimlessly seeking terra firma, yet another reminder of those days when the good stuff still had wires attached to it.