Everything worth knowing about teenagers in the 1980s is found in John Hughes’ 1984 directorial debut, Sixteen Candles. This is a perfect movie, capturing it all in just two days in the life of 16-year-old Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald). Sam’s 16th birthday is the day before her older sister’s wedding, and it starts out anything but sweet. Her entire family is so consumed with the wedding details, they forget. Sam heads to the back-to-school dance saddled with her grandparents’ Asian exchange student Long Duk Dong, in love with impossibly sweet campus hunk Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling), and chased by relentless freshman geek, Farmer Ted (Anthony Michael Hall). Hilarity, revelations, and romance ensue.
I guess when you've been lauded in the pages of Stereophile you're not intimidated rolling into the HE Show with a network digital media server. You know, the kind of thing that plays the "M" word.
I don't know the degree to which interactivity will drive next-gen HD sales, but HD DVD is leading in this category, big-time. Already ahead with picture-in-picture driven features such as Warner's In Movie Experience and Universal's U-Control, Toshiba's latest firmware updates for all its players, including the first-gen players, have enabled web-based interactivity for broadband users that is now available on a few titles, with more to follow.
Now that's a bookshelf speaker! The ICS designation indicates that this speaker is designed with in-cabinet use in mind, Snell's ICS 1030 LCR speaker is a work of art. Literally. Snell works with a talented artist and will paint any scene the customer wishes on the grill to make the speaker disappear into its environment. The speaker pictured here is obviously painted like a set of books and the effect is nothing short of striking.
I have more info to follow up with on the <I>Blood Diamond </I> Blu-ray Disc but that nonsense is going to have to wait in the wake of the passing of our friend and colleague Randy Tomlinson.
One piece of semi-disturbing news was confirmed to me yesterday. Although Sony’s PlayStation3 will carry both Ethernet and wireless means of connecting to the Internet, Sony’s standalone BD-PS1 Blu-ray player will not even have an Ethernet connection,
The BDP-S2000ES picks up where the vaunted Sony DVD players of the past left off. A massively overbuilt chassis, a hermeticaly shielded transport and all other srots of gooodies. According to the Sony folks on site, the player will decode Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD High Resolution audio, but not DTS-HD Master Audio. It is also claimed that the player will output TrueHD and DTS-HD in native bitstream form over HDMI 1.3.