David Ranada

Other Tech
Microsoft Goes High-End
David Ranada  |  Oct 21, 2002
As I write these words, right around the corner from Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and his pals James Cameron, Peter Gabriel, Beatles' producer Sir George Martin, and LL Cool J-Microsoft calls him "a major music artist and film actor"-introduced with typical extravagance the clumsily named Windows Media 9 Series, the technologies formerly c
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Big-League Receivers
David Ranada  |  Jul 21, 2002
Photos by Tony Cordoza

There are high-priced major-league baseball players (is that redundant?), and then there are the Mark McGuires and Sammy Sosas - players whose abilities and accomplishments leave even their overpaid teammates in awe. The same holds true as you approach the stratospheric reaches of high-end A/V receivers.

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Other Tech
Facing the Codec Challenge
David Ranada  |  Jun 09, 2002

The steady progression of compressed digital audio into all sorts of places (do you really need to listen to Mozart on a PDA?) is raising all sorts of issues. But none is more important to readers of Sound & Vision than the ability of the codecs - the encode/decode software - to faithfully reproduce music after compressing CD tracks to file sizes that can be easily downloaded or stored.

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Custom Installation How-To
Pioneer Elite DV-47A DVD/SACD Combi Player
David Ranada  |  Apr 18, 2002

Wouldn't it be great if you could just go out and buy the surround sound music titles you're interested in without having to worry about whether they're on DVD-Audio or Super Audio CD (SACD)?

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Other Tech
High-Def Discs and Tapes
David Ranada  |  Apr 02, 2002

Okay, I know I shouldn't gloat. But I told you so. In a keynote speech at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) annual convention a year ago, I warned that if the broadcast and cable industries didn't get their act together when it came to putting high-definition signals out there in a big way, high-def programming would be provided by other means.

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Other Tech
The Cutting Edge: Sony MXS10 Vaio PC
David Ranada  |  Apr 01, 2002

At $2,800, the least expensive Vaio PC in Sony's MX desktop line doesn't seem like much of a bargain these days, even for a 1.7-GHz, Pentium 4 with an 80-gigabyte (GB) hard drive, 512 megabytes (MB) of memory, the exciting "home" version of Windows XP, and two better-than-average speakers (the 15-inch Sony LCD monitor shown is $600 extra).

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Custom Installation How-To
Opening Moves
David Ranada  |  Jan 21, 2002

The players are in position, and the pieces are now on the board. But this is not a chess game, and the stakes are even higher than in the richest of Grand Master tournaments. This is the beginning of another video-recorder format war, but unlike the VHS vs. Beta conflict of the late 1970s and early '80s, there are three competing formats.

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Other Tech
Behind The Numbers: Digital Surround Receivers
David Ranada  |  Dec 21, 2001
Digital surround receivers are by far the most complicated products we test. Not only do they have two primary modes of operation - two-channel stereo and multichannel surround sound - both using their digital inputs, but today they may also be called on to handle multichannel high-resolution analog signals from a DVD-Audio or Super Audio CD player.
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Custom Installation How-To
Panasonic DMR-E20 DVD-R/RAM Deck
David Ranada  |  Oct 03, 2001
Less than a year after I reviewed Panasonic's DMR-E10 DVD-RAM recorder in the December 2000 issue, here I am reviewing a follow-up model that, as we've become accustomed in things electronic, has more useful features, equivalent or better performance, and a much smaller price tag - $1,500 instead of $4,000! The drop to a far more realistic price is tre mendous prog ress all by itself.
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Battle of The Bookshelfs
David Ranada  |  Aug 12, 2001

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