Westworld: Season One ended in a cliffhanger with Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) taking charge of the adult amusement park. Westworld: Season Two picks up shortly after this event with the puppet show now over and the liberated “hosts” coming after the humans for their own pound of flesh.
Both a prequel and a sequel, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again tells two stories: the first set in the present day as Sophie Sheridan (Amanda Seyfried) prepares for the grand reopening of her mother Donna’s (Meryl Streep) hotel, and the second when the young Donna (Lily James) first arrives on the island in 1979. Sophie learns about her mother’s fun-filled adventures with the young Dynamos, Tanya and Rosie, and how she first met her three possible dads, Harry, Bill, and Sam, all those years ago.
AT A GLANCE Plus
Supports Dolby Atmos, DTS:X, and Auro-3D formats
13 processing channels and 15 audio outputs
Clean, highly detailed sound
Minus
Very narrow remote sensor
THE VERDICT
Marantz’s new flagship surround processor makes the most of the Dolby Atmos, DTS:X, and Auro-3D formats while providing a notable sound quality improvement over its predecessor.
I remember my first flagship A/V receiver like it was yesterday. It was the year 2000, and Onkyo’s TX-DS989, which sold for a cool $3,200 and featured seven channels of built-in amplification plus support for the latest, greatest THX Surround EX and DTS-ES codecs was every home theater enthusiast’s dream. With rear surround speakers now added to the mix, a home theater could actually match the arrays found in cinemas.
AT A GLANCE Plus
Very accurate sound
Excellent dynamics
Great for movies
Minus
Pricey
S150 speaker terminals don't accept standard banana plugs
THE VERDICT
M&K Sound's revamp of its long- standing THX certified line delivers audible improvements over the original speakers.
It was a sad day for home theater fans when M&K Sound exited the speaker-building business in 2007. Fortunately, a group of investors and former managers bought that company's assets and created a new venture called MK Sound. To celebrate the company's 40-year anniversary in 2013, the team decided to bring back the legendary M&K Sound company name, along with the original Miller&Kreisel brand.
When an IMF agent gets killed in the line of duty, critical files containing Russian nuclear launch codes that he was carrying fall into the wrong hands. With the help of two IMF colleagues, agent Ethan Hunt penetrates the Kremlin to find out the identity of “Cobalt,” a terrorist who wants the codes to start a nuclear war. Things go awry when Cobalt plants explosives in the fortress-like complex, and Hunt and his team get blamed for the resulting carnage. As tensions rise between the U.S. and Russia, the President is forced to disavow the IMF, leaving it up to Hunt and his team to solve the crisis.
Thomas Anderson leads a double life. During the day, he is a computer drone for a big corporation; by night, he’s Neo, hacker extraordinaire. Morpheus opens Neo’s eyes to the real world, a vast wasteland where most of humanity has been enslaved by machines that use our bodies as a power source. To reclaim the Earth, Neo must reenter the Matrix in order to overthrow the machines and discover his true destiny in life.
A group of kids discover an old video game console in the basement of their school with an unknown game called Jumanji. After choosing their avatars, the foursome is transported into the game’s jungle setting and assume their roles. They soon discover that not only have they taken on the look of the characters, but have inherited their strengths and weaknesses. To survive the game and get back home, all must work together to pass the obstacles placed in front of them, but the stakes are higher than they could have ever imagined.
A secret from her father’s past leads adventure-seeker Lara Croft on one of her greatest challenges. What she seeks to find is the Triangle of Light, a legendary artifact whose power to alter space and time happens only once every 5,000 years. Also in hot pursuit: the Illuminati, a secret society bent on world domination. Lara and her trusty tech-geek sidekick, Bryce, must do everything in their power to stop them.
In the late 1980s in the town of Derry, Maine, a young boy goes out to test a paper boat during a torrential rainstorm. Braving the elements, he places the boat in the gutter and runs alongside to watch its progress. Unfortunately, he’s too slow and watches it descend into the storm drain. He bends down to see if it’s lost forever and is surprised to see a clown staring back at him. Startled, he quickly jumps back.
Monolith 15" Performance Features Build Quality Value
Monolith 12" Performance Features Build Quality Value
PRICE $800, $1,300
AT A GLANCE Plus
Clean, copious, and articulate bass
Outstanding build quality
Five-year replacement warranty
Minus
No parametric equalizer
No app control
Extremely heavy
THE VERDICT
Entry into the crowded internet-direct subwoofer market is a bold move from Monoprice, but the performance of these subs will surely make some waves and breed some fierce competition.
Reproducing a movie soundtrack in a home environment isn’t an easy task. At your local cinema, the theater will hopefully have sound dampening so you don’t hear outside noise. And if you’re lucky, the system will be calibrated properly and provide enough headroom so there’s no clipping or distortion during the dynamic portions of the soundtrack.