Thomas J. Norton | Jan 28, 2007 | First Published: Jan 29, 2007 |
I have no statistics to back it up, but the week before the Super Bowl must be pretty hectic in your friendly neighborhood video store. Oh, sure, the end of year holidays are big, and tax refund season brings out the mad money that Uncle Sam has been keeping safe for you all year. But it's the annual rush to watch the Big Game on a Big Screen television that starts sports fans hearts aflutter.
Algolith's Mosquito is an outboard video noise reduction device that Algolith describes as an "analog and digital compression artifact reducer." At $3000, it may be the most expensive device of its kind offered to consumers. It may also be the most sophisticated. If you judge your audio-video components by weight, it won't make much of an impact. But weight has little to do with the performance of this sort of product.
<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.
It’s hard to believe but I now live in a two Bose household. My first Bose was a car stereo that came as part of a package deal in the Mazda 3 that I bought nearly two years ago. I had to take it to get the whole shebang. It wasn’t really a bad deal. Dissing Bose may be a spectator sport among heavy-duty audiophiles, but apart from a little bass heaviness (not exactly rare in car stereos), it’s a more than respectable piece of work. It I had wanted to buy a car for the stereo, I would have gone with an Acura TL.
You know the gag. You see someone walking down the street and about to step on a banana peel. Do you shout "STOP," or remain silent and then applaud as he does an awesome pirouette.
The BeoVision 9 television, which just started shipping, is B&O's current flagship 50-inch plasma. The 50" set, at around $20,000, may seem pricey for a 1366x768 design (it uses Panasonic glass), and it is. But it does include a built-in center speaker with an Acoustic Lens tweeter and 5" woofer. It also features an on-board version of B&O's BeoMedia (available separately in the BeoSystem 3), which includes all of the features of a sophisticated pre-pro and more. These include full 7.1-channel decoding (expandable up to 10 channels), speaker switching and speaker assignment options that may be the most flexible on the market, and easy access to sources as diverse as CD, radio, cable TV, satellite TV, DVD, photos, digital cameras, and the Internet. And oh, yes, the entire cabinet has a motorized swivel. Very cool.
B&O began as a radio manufacturer in the late 1920s, operating out of Svend Olufsen's family farmhouse outside of Struer, Denmark. Its first product, the Eliminator, was designed to allow a radio to be powered by line voltage instead of a battery. The photo shows B&O consultant Ronny Kaas Mortensen next to the radio. The small box at the upper right hand corner of the radio is the Eliminator. It was not only built inside the radio itself, but also sold separately. It also cleaned up the dirty power line output of the day—the first audiophile high-end power conditioner!
The BeoLab 3, shown here with acoustic engineer Peter Chapman, is a tiny sphere with a small woofer-midrange, a single Acoustic Lens tweeter, and a two on-board ICEpower amps, all in a tiny, spherical cabinet with an internal volume of 1.5 liters. It sounded remarkably close in balance to the big BeoLab 5 (the deepest bass and ultimate volume capability excluded, of course).
The BeoSound 4 is an all-purpose CD, radio, SD card slot, and optional Digital Audio Broadcasting (European format) music system. The pyramid-shaped BeoLab 4 speakers are self-powered, with digital amplification. Approximately 8" high, B&O calls the BeoLab 4 a multi-purpose unit, suitable for a small stereo system, for a music system or computer, or as a surround sound speaker in an AV setup. It can be placed on a desk stand, floor stand, wall mounted, or hung from the ceiling.
Speakers for cordless phones, another B&O product category, must be tiny. Looks like it also might make an interesting tweeter, though probably not, as the frequency response of telephone drivers is band limited by design.
"The Cube" is the first stop in testing a B&O loudspeaker. At 12x12x13 meters it is the world's largest privately owned sound test room. It is not an anechoic chamber. Instead, B&O built a space large enough to use MLS measurements to a high degree of precision. MLS measures the speaker's response to an impulse. This result is then gated to eliminate the effect of the sound reflected off the walls. The reproduced and filtered impulse is then converted back to a frequency response (techies will recognize this as a Fourier transformation). The two walls of the chamber are damped, not to eliminate reflections but to speed up the time between impulses (a number of impulses are averaged for greater precision). The support structure shown here holds the loudspeaker (in the photo it's one of B&O's very tall, pencil-thin designs). The mike is visible in the distance. Measurements are made in 140 different directions.
If stepping off the plane into the Copenhagen airport is a little like stepping into the world's biggest IKEA store, then stepping out of the tiny airport in Karup, Denmark is a little like transporting to the farmlands of Nebraska. But my mission to the far west end of the Jutland peninsula, together with a number of other European and North American journalists, was not sightseeing, but information. Information about what Struer, Denmark manufacturer B&O is currently about, and how the activities in its several facilities are leading to interesting new products, and how those products are influenced by the thinking and research behind them.