Steve Guttenberg

HT Talks To the Doors’ one and only recording engineer, Bruce Botnick, about remixing and remastering Perception.

I spent a big chunk of my life running movies in New York City neighborhood dumps, art houses, and palaces, so I may be a little biased, but Peter Flynn’s The Dying of the Light documentary about projectionists brought tears to my eyes. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for Flynn, since projectionists are much more at home on the other side of the lens. They all share a common bond, knowing that if they do the job well, the audience will be unaware they did anything at all. That’s the beauty of it.

When it comes to home theaters, I thought I'd seen it all. But nothing's come close to this. First, I'm going to try to describe the sheer magnitude of Jeremy Kipnis' theater. His Stewart Snowmatte laboratory-grade screen is the biggest I've ever seen in a home, and in the back of the theater, there's a Sony ultra-high-resolution (4,096-by-2,160) SRX-S110 digital projector. I'm looking everywhere, jotting down questions, and Kipnis sounds almost giddy talking about his theater's capabilities. He refers to his baby, the Kipnis Studio Standard (KSS), as "The Greatest Show on Earth." And from the looks of it, he may be right.

Over-performing little speakers were always part of the high-end scene, but NHT’s SuperZero was the one that broke the mold. I recently spoke with NHT founder and president Chris Byrne to learn more about this classic speaker. The model that preceded it was, naturally enough, the Zero, but it didn’t take off, so it was redesigned with a different tweeter, a Japanese 1-inch soft dome made by Tonnegen. The woofer was a 4.5-inch treated paper cone driver, made in San Diego. The SuperZero sold for $230 per pair in 1993.