Thomas J. Norton

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Mummy Musings
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jun 20, 2017
I haven’t seen the latest Tom Cruise iteration of The Mummy. And with its crushing reviews I doubt that I’ll even invest in the inevitable UHD Blu-ray version that, judging from the current domestic box office returns for the film, should show up on Amazon in about two weeks.

The subject isn’t exactly a treasure trove of classic tropes, but has its fans. The original was, of course, the 1932 Boris Karloff classic (in Hollywood, anything that old is deemed a classic). Three other entries turned up in the ‘40s, followed by 1955’s Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy (the latter is definitely on my Bucket List). There was also a quadrilogy (did I just coin a word?) of Mummy movies in the ‘50s from Britain’s Hammer Films, and several animated versions...

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Music by....
Thomas J. Norton  |  May 07, 2024
How often do you look for the music credit line in a movie you're watching or want to see? Probably not often if ever, unless the composer is one of the big names. That means, in all likelihood, names such as John Williams (essentially retired) or Hans Zimmer. Throw in a few other names you might recognize, such as Howard Shore (The Lord of the Rings), the late Jerry Goldsmith (Alien, Tora, Tora, Tora, and countless others), and the also late James Horner (best known for Titanic but that's only one of his many memorable scores).
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Music, Movies, and the Classics
Thomas J. Norton  |  Aug 22, 2023
Inspiration for a blog can come from any number of places. In the August/September print edition of Sound & Vision, Ken C. Pohlmann writes about the issues involved in cataloging classical music for access on music streaming sites.

Classical music as a category is a catch-all term for compositions originally played in front of a live audience. Most such music is a century or more old, but adventurous composers are still writing it today. It's similar to modern "popular" music (rock, country, metal, and more) mainly in the fact that it's now experienced more from recordings than viewed and heard live. The late J. Gordon Holt, founder of our sister publication, Stereophile didn't, as far as I know, deprecate popular music, but was a strong proponent of well-recorded classical music, viewing it as the only genre fully suited for judging audio gear. Was he right?

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Musings in HDMI 1.3 Video
Thomas J. Norton  |  Apr 15, 2007

HDMI 1.0 was introduced to the market in 2002. As a means of carrying both digital audio and video between the source and the display, it offered several advantages over competing technologies, the most prominent being IEEE 1393, commonly known as FireWire. HDMI carried both audio and video, and also offered alluring security advantages that appealed, in particular, to Hollywood.

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Musings on HDMI Audio
Thomas J. Norton  |  Apr 22, 2007

Previously, on this blog (see below), I discussed the upgrades that HDMI 1.3 offered for video. Most of them, in my opinion, were nice to have as a hedge against future improvements in sources and displays, but did not offer any real benefits with present and foreseeable video formats, both standard and high definition. As far as video is concerned, then, I saw no reason to toss out your present gear or hold off a purchase until there's a wide range of sources, switchers, and displays with HDMI 1.3. That will likely be a long wait.

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My Big Fat, Super-Duper CES Wrap-Up
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jan 11, 2017
Now that I have your attention…CES 2017 is in the history books. While I haven't yet heard the final attendance, I'm certain that somewhere north of 150,000 people were jockeying for position when I visited the Las Vegas Convention Center, the heart of the event. It's also supplemented by several other venues, including the Venetian Hotel, traditionally the site of the specialty (i.e., high-end) audio exhibits.

The video high point of the big show for me was Sony's CLETIS (Crystal LED Integrated System)...

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Blu-ray Movie ReviewsUltra HD Blu-ray Movie Reviews
My Fair Lady
Thomas J. Norton  |  Aug 13, 2021
Picture
Sound
Extras
George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion premiered in London back in 1913. Loosely based on an ancient Greek myth, its plot involves a linguistics professor, Henry Higgins, teaching a bedraggled flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to speak proper English—not only well enough to pass her off as a duchess at an embassy ball, but to "get her a job as a lady's maid or a shop assistant, which requires better English!"
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My Second Bose
Thomas J. Norton  |  Dec 17, 2006

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.

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My Top 10 Guilty Pleasure Movies
Thomas J. Norton  |  Aug 04, 2015
What turns a movie into a guilty pleasure? I suppose it’s a film that you enjoy, though you know you shouldn’t because everyone else seems to hate it. There’s a lot of such films in my collection, some of them bought by me, others remnants of the “too odd to review” bins in the publications I’ve written for, from the Stereophile Guide to Home Theater to the present.

Here are ten of them, and they’re by no means the only ones on my shelf...

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My Two Cents on News Around the AV World
Thomas J. Norton  |  Sep 29, 2015
It’s fall, and a young man’s fancy (and we hope a woman’s as well) turns to thoughts of evenings by a roaring fire listening to music or watching a movie or two on that new flat screen UHD TV (hopefully not mounted above said fireplace!). There have been so many interesting posts to the S&V website recently that I can’t resist the temptation to offer a few thoughts on some of them. Some commenters to these individual posts have beaten me to the punch, but I’ll press on.

Paradigm Concept I’ll soon be finishing up a review of the Paradigm Prestige 95F loudspeaker for our sister publication Stereophile. No sneak peeks here, but it has certainly grabbed my attention.

So I was intrigued when I read about the prototype Paradigm Concept 4F.

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