Darryl Wilkinson

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090308roomtv
Darryl Wilkinson  |  Sep 03, 2008  |  0 comments
I arrive in Denver, Colorado – the city still awash with Democratic campaign paraphernalia (much of it for sale in a tent outside the convention center) – to attend the umpteenth CEDIA convention in my long and storied career. I came with visions of large, flat-panel HDTVs hanging everywhere, including in my hotel room as befits such an esteemed member of the press as I. But, alas, all I found waiting for me in the Sheraton was this lowly Philips 27 (or thereabouts)-inch, definitely low-def, analog TV sporting a CRT that’s almost as curved as my stomach after a late-night drink-laden press dinner. The only consolation is that at least there are plenty of channels for me not to watch since I’ll only see this room for maybe six hours a night (well, “see” the room is a generous term).
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090308lgflix
Darryl Wilkinson  |  Sep 03, 2008  |  0 comments
LG and Netflix announced the fruits of a previously inked partnership: the new LG BD300 Network Blu-ray Disc Player that’s the world’s first Blu-ray disc player to be able to instantly stream movies and TV episodes from Netflix (if you have a Netflix subscription).
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Cirque du SpeakerCraft
Darryl Wilkinson  |  Sep 03, 2008  |  0 comments
Bringing back fond memories of the one misdirected year (1998) when CEDIA held its convention in New Orleans (just after another near-miss storm) and not many conventioneers (including me) made it to many of their appointments or meetings, SpeakerCraft enlisted the aid of some scantily clad acrobatic dancers to catch the attention of the press folks who didn’t go to the Toshiba press conference. (It worked.)
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More Cirque du SpeakerCraft
Darryl Wilkinson  |  Sep 03, 2008  |  0 comments
Oh, yeah, and the new SpeakerCraft Rox outdoor rock speakers look “more like rocks”.
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Sony Gives us a Finger?
Darryl Wilkinson  |  Sep 03, 2008  |  1 comments
If you look closely in this picture of the chaos that immediately followed the Sony press conference, you’ll see…chaos. If you look a little closer, you’ll see some pencil-thin speakers (actually, I think the term they used was “the width of a finger” but I may have been in the middle of a mile-high altitude-induced alcohol-enhanced stupor at the time so it might as easily have been “the width of a fingerling potato”) on display here as part of the BDV-IT1000ES - Sony’s first ES HTiB that includes an integrated Blu-ray Disc player. The main speakers each measure approximately .75-inch wide by 22 inches long, and they’ll come with the rest of the system when it ships in October and you fork over the required $1,999.
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Bookshelf Speaker ReviewsSoundbar Reviews
Definitive Technology Mythos SSA-50 Speaker System
Darryl Wilkinson  |  Aug 25, 2008  |  0 comments
Surround sound—friend or faux?

When Definitive Technology originally introduced its Mythos line of speakers, the slender, curved, aluminum-cabinet tower models were matched by equally svelte, under-5-inch-deep on-wall and center-channel models using the same form and style turned horizontally. A while ago, the company literally expanded the Mythos center-channel speakers by packing the front LCR speakers

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Home Theater Systems ReviewsSoundbar Reviews
ZVOX 425 Speaker System
Darryl Wilkinson  |  Jul 27, 2008  |  0 comments
Taking the shortcut home.

Some people would call it cheating. Others might be less pejorative and consider it a shortcut. Either way, setting a rectangular box on top of your TV, plugging in an analog stereo RCA cable, finding an outlet for a single AC power cord, and pressing the power button isn’t what God intended when he gave us home theater. No, a real man’s home theater demands a separate processor and amplifiers, multiple speakers, many long runs of speaker wire, and an inconvenient place to put a subwoofer. It should take real work to set the whole thing up—and more than a sporting chance to wire something incorrectly.

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On-Wall Speaker Reviews
Artcoustic DF75-55 X2 On-Wall Speaker System
Darryl Wilkinson  |  May 04, 2008  |  0 comments
The fine art of disguise.

No one likes to look at speakers. (You and I don’t count.) Thus the quest by many manufacturers to find the Holy Grail of speakers: the totally invisible wall-o’-sound. Unfortunately, the invisible stuff I’ve seen so far has been pretty uninspiring and by no means anything you could call close to high performance. At present, short of an acoustic miracle, we’re stuck with speakers that are going to be seen, be they in-wall, on-wall, floorstanding, or whatever.

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Surround Processor Reviews
Anthem AVM 40 Pre/Pro
Darryl Wilkinson  |  Feb 26, 2008  |  0 comments
Hide your credit cards now before it's too late.

My son, Nick, recently attended an engineering weekend for high-school seniors at a nearby university. After splitting into teams, the attendees competed in several engineering challenges, one of which was to build a contraption made from a meager assortment of supplied materials (including an Alka-Seltzer tablet) that would move a small toy car across a pan of water.

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Subwoofer Reviews
REL T3 Subwoofer
Darryl Wilkinson  |  Feb 19, 2008  |  Published: Feb 20, 2008  |  0 comments
Depth charged.

Last year, my family and I moved from our little house near a noisy city airport to a more pastoral setting where, aside from a nearby neighbor who likes to bulldoze anything with leaves on it, the loudest thing is an old four-wheel-drive F250 pickup we bought for hauling things (including our butts) around the farm. Although it's in surprisingly good shape, some things don't always work, like the original factory radio, for instance.

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