Steve Guttenberg

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Paradigm Monitor Series v.5 Speaker System
TOWER SPEAKER REVIEWS
Steve Guttenberg  |  Feb 11, 2008  |  0 comments
Are you experienced?

At its best, home theater is all about making movies feel so real you'd swear you're there. And not just the wham-bam flicks; some of my best experiences have come from straight-ahead dramas. That was absolutely the case with Breach, a chilling portrait of FBI agent Robert Hanssen, the man who sold countless security secrets to the Soviet Union for over 20 years. Actor Chris Cooper's portrayal of the psychopathic traitor totally mesmerized me, but I also credit Paradigm's fifth revision of their Monitor Series speakers for keeping my attention glued to the screen. Every detail of the sound—from the claustrophobic acoustics of Hanssen's office and the whirring noise of his computers' cooling fans, to the dense traffic snarl of Washington, D.C. streets—were all so effortlessly presented that I never thought about the speakers. That's the Zen of it all. When everything's just right, you don't realize the speakers are there.

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Peter Gabriel
THE S&V INTERVIEW
Steve Guttenberg  |  Oct 28, 2005  |  Published: Sep 28, 2005  |  0 comments
Gabriel talks about his new dvd play, technology, and why ipod won't take over the music world.

Peter Gabriel's career got off the ground when he fronted one of Britain's top prog-rock bands, Genesis. He went solo in 1975. For this interview, we focused on his groundbreaking videos and his lifelong fascination with technology.

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Philips Fidelio X1 Headphones
HEADPHONE REVIEWS
Steve Guttenberg  |  Jun 18, 2013  |  2 comments

Performance
Features
Comfort
Value
Price: $299 At a Glance: Sinfully comfy • Artfully balanced frequency response • Lavish build quality boasts aluminum trim and real leather

It wasn’t that long ago that Philips wasn’t the first name that would come to mind for audiophile headphones. Things picked up early last year when the company totally revamped its headphone lineup, and the Fidelio Series turned a lot of heads. Philips was in the big leagues and fully competitive with the majors.

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Pioneer Kuro Plasma HDTV
VINTAGE GEAR
Steve Guttenberg  |  Feb 14, 2013  |  10 comments
The Pioneer Kuro plasma display broke new ground upon its introduction in 2007 and was quickly hailed by critics and buyers as The Greatest Television Ever Made. Incredibly, as many Home Theater readers know, the Kuro line that debuted in 2007 was phased out by 2010—which proves that just because you make the best, doesn’t mean people will buy it.
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Pioneer VP-1000 LaserDisc Player
VINTAGE GEAR
Steve Guttenberg  |  Jan 31, 2013  |  1 comments
Magnavox brought the first Laserdisc player, the VH-8000, to market in late 1978, but Pioneer was the company that put the format on the map. Its first player, the VP-1000, debuted in the U.S. in 1980, and later in Japan. I doubt Pioneer ever thought Laserdisc would threaten VHS and Betamax’s dominance in the mass market; Laserdisc was targeted to high-end buyers.
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Pixels & Bits: Episode No. 1
Pixels & Bits, S&V Videos, Special Features
Rob Sabin, Steve Guttenberg  |  Jul 18, 2017  |  5 comments
In this first episode of Sound & Vision's podcast Pixels & Bits, Editor-in-Chief Rob Sabin and Contributing Technical Editor Steve Guttenberg discuss their roots in high-end audio; the affordable Magnepan MMGi magnetic planar speakers (4:00); the problem with "feature glut" (9:00), and whether Sonos sacrificed too much sound quality to gain simplicity with its Playbar soundbar (14:20).

Comments are welcome on these subjects, along with your suggestions for future episodes!

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PSB Speakers M4U 4 Headphone
HEADPHONE REVIEWS
Steve Guttenberg  |  Dec 09, 2015  |  1 comments

Performance
Build Quality
Comfort
Value
PRICE $299

AT A GLANCE
Plus
Two-way hybrid dual-driver design
User-replaceable cables
Two-year warranty
Minus
Resolution no match for all-armature in-ear designs

THE VERDICT
The PSB Speakers M4U 4 blocks a good amount of external noise, feels comfy, and sounds sweet. What’s not to like?

PSB Speakers’ Paul Barton is a quick learner. After decades designing his company’s speakers, he jumped into headphones with the PSB M4U 2 full-size, noise-canceling ’phones. The M4U 2 was hailed by critics and consumers alike, and his next design for NAD, the Viso HP50, was even better, Barton was clearly on a roll. Now, with the M4U 4, Barton may be the first celebrated speaker designer to ever tackle crafting an in-ear headphone.

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PSB VisionSound 300 Speaker System and Marantz SR8500 A/V Receiver
AV RECEIVER REVIEWS, ON-WALL SPEAKER REVIEWS
Steve Guttenberg  |  Sep 14, 2006  |  0 comments
The sweet sounds of success.

Neil Young was on NPR chatting about his new movie, Heart of Gold, when he uttered a line that stuck with me: "The art of singing is making a sound that comes from your heart." Thanks Neil, I'm co-opting the idea to describe what distinguishes great home theater systems—their sound touches your heart. Yeah, that's it. While components are getting better all the time, many lack that special something. There's nothing obviously out of whack, it's just that their sound doesn't connect on an emotional level. Sometimes the individual components are all top notch, but, if they're not well matched to each other, the sound suffers. When everything clicks, you know it. That was certainly the case when I hooked up Marantz's SR8500 A/V receiver with a set of PSB's VisionSound VS300 speakers and SubSeries 5i subwoofer. They're all charmers.

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Quad ESL-57 Electrostatic Speaker
VINTAGE GEAR
Steve Guttenberg  |  Oct 01, 2012  |  0 comments
The Acoustical Manufacturing Company’s Quad ESL-57 was the world’s first production full-range electrostatic speaker. It debuted in 1957 when hi-fi speakers were big boxes and used moving-coil drivers, so the ESL-57’s flat-panel, downright minimalist design not only looked like a radical advance, its thin-film diaphragm’s low-distortion and lightning-fast transient response sounded truly revelatory to 1950s audiophile ears. The speaker’s introduction came not so many years after the transition from 78-RPM records to higher-fidelity LPs took place. The market was primed for a more transparent transducer technology, and Quad had the best-sounding speaker of the age.
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RCA CT-100 Color TV
VINTAGE GEAR
Steve Guttenberg  |  Aug 16, 2012  |  13 comments
RCA's CT-100 may not have been the first consumer color TV in the U.S., Westinghouse's set beat it by a few weeks, but that model didn't sell in significant numbers. Both sets were on the market less than 100 days after the Federal Communications Commission finalized its standards for broadcasting color television.

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