Brent Butterworth

"You test … amplifiers?" the lovely brunette MBA said to me from across the couch in the lobby of a hipster L.A. hotel. Sadly, my reply - "There are people who care about this stuff!" - didn't convince her of the value of my work. On some level, though, I'm in sympathy with her sentiment. While I do, on occasion, test amplifiers, I'm really a speaker and headphone reviewer.

The advent of cheap audio measurement gear has made it easy for do-it-yourselfers to tweak their systems and even test their own speakers and amps. Unfortunately, it has also spawned a new generation of would-be technicians doing really bad speaker measurements.

Like panthers or hamsters or bats, video projectors do the bulk of their business in the dark. But darkness makes most humans uncomfortable, which may be why front projection has never made it into the mainstream - in order to get a good picture, you have to turn most, and preferably all, of the lights off.