Innehållsförteckning för October - November 2019 från Sound + Image

I’ve finally come up with a reason to be excited about 8K. There are many reasons suggested by those with 8K TVs for sale, of course. It’s higher resolution, that has to be good! You can sit closer, the 8K content will come, and how great do the demos look! How about that upscaling? And there’s always the ‘because it’s there’ argument: why not have it? (Just the money, really.) But now I think I’ve not only found a reason to want 8K to succeed, I’m actually excited about the possibilities. And the reason is lip-sync. Or latency. I seem to be quite sensitive to lip-sync, and I’ve complained in several reviews recently that products have left the image and sound intolerably separated, so badly out of sync that the…

‘Transformation’ is the word REL is using for the changes delivered in its latest Series S subwoofers, the S/510 ($3499) and S/810 ($4499) following REL’s longstanding compact-medium chassis concept, but coming with numerous upgrades and stylish new cabinetry which is available in gloss black or white, featuring new stable rails rather than feet, which cantilever the main cabinet forward for a stylish ‘floating’ appearance. The S/510 is pictured right in stereo use, but both models can be stacked in 4- or 6-unit line arrays, just like REL’s reference models. The S/510 uses the company’s REL NextGen3 amplifier, tuned to 500W, with two new sets of custom filters “to extract the utmost in brute force and spaciousness”. Upgrades to the 10-inch ContinuousCast alloy cone allow it to handle the extra power,…

Pro-Ject Audio Systems’ first vinyl record cleaner was the VC-S, an affordable vacuum record-cleaning machine which has found many user. The VC-S2 ALU ($899) is a direct replacement to the original VC-S, but this latest VC-E version (below) provides an even more affordable and compact solution at $799. It turns the record superfast within two seconds per rotation, “about three times faster than comparable cleaning machines” says Pro-Ject, and cleans records in as little as one or two rotations. The robust metal arm is easy to use, mechanically stable and focuses suction power directly onto the record surface. For more information, visit www.projectaudio.com.au…

It’s still in concept with no talk of a consumer launch, but Panasonic’s double-layer LCD panel claims to deliver the blacks and contrast levels of OLED. They call it ‘MegaCon’ — not the best abbreviation, perhaps (it’s short for MegaContrast), but the concept is intriguing as an LCD solution with claims to OLED performance levels not only for blacks, but also capable of high brightness and mastering monitor levels of colour accuracy. The technology developed by Panasonic Liquid Crystal Display Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Panasonic Corporation, uses a double layer of LCD in front of the backlight, the first layer delivering monochrome black-and-white luminance by means of light-modulating cells, and then a second layer adding the colour information. With two layers between the backlight and the viewer this allows…

A At IFA 2019 in Berlin we caught up with Paul Gray, who is Research and Analysis Director for TV, Consumer Electronics and Devices with IHS Markit, which puts him in a position to spot the trends well ahead of the curve. We started him talking about 8K TVs, but this led to a fascinating suggestion for how 5G might enable a complete rethink about broadcasting systems for radio, TV and data. SOUND+IMAGE: So is 8K taking off? PAUL GRAY: Like 4K at the beginning, it’s push, it’s not pull. The question is always content, and content is scarce. Undoubtedly 8K camera bodies are becoming available, and filmmakers are beginning to shoot in 8K because the camera bodies are available. And definitely an 8K master will look better in 4K…

Given that the Flip models are responsible for 20 million of JBL’s 100 million portable speaker sales so far (see main article), where does that leave the next size up, this Charge model, currently in its version 4? It’s physically larger — 22cm long, its diameter 95mm, compared with the latest Flip’s 18cm and 70mm. Do the sums and that gives it more than double the physical volume and nearly double the weight at 965g compared to 540g, as well as a driver some 30% larger, quoted at an oval 5 x 9cm with 30W of power (the Flip 5’s is 4.4 x 8cm with 20W of power). Note that this is still a single driver — both Flip and Charge designs are mono, unless you pair them up with…

Meridian’s DSP7200SE digital active floorstanding loudspeakers have been described by The Absolute Sound as “a magnificent speaker in the flesh... superbly finished in high gloss piano lacquer, every sign of great attention to detail in its design and construction.” Bit of a shame, then, to hide them behind a projection screen, not to mention 10 other Meridian in-wall side and rear speakers, and six in-ceiling speakers… indeed Len Wallis Audio’s team has since learned that this Reference 13.4.6 Atmos configuration — that’s 23 speaker channels in all — is the largest channel count of any Meridian theatre system in the world. So we were pleased to see that the front stage speakers have been specially lit behind the screen (above) to show them off when the rest of the system…

“The 100-inch screen rejects ambient light quite well, designed to reflect light from the angles required to fill the screen and deliver it to viewers in front.” Clearly there’s a problem with big TVs — transportation. How do you even get a 100-inch TV into your home? The more common solution for a picture of such a size has long been to have a projector. But a projector isn’t a TV. It doesn’t have speakers (at least, any worth mentioning) or a TV tuner or many of the other usability features of a TV. And it invariably has problems with ambient light which leaves it being a solution for evening use only. Which brings us to the Hisense 100RXL 100-inch Laser TV. It has all the facilities of a fully-equipped…

Focal’s Astral 16 comes with a full licence to use the Dirac Live 2.0 software, along with a measurement microphone. Let’s be clear, this process is fiddly compared to the built-in optimisation functions of many home theatre receivers. But, of course, that’s in part due to the power of the system. Basically, you download the software to a computer — PC or Mac — plug the supplied microphone into it, place it in five or more defined positions and run the software’s test tones. These basically do a sine-wave sweep for each of your speakers. It assumes each is full range — so it runs your subwoofer up into the treble — to develop its correction curves. That way, should you change your crossover frequencies, which you set in the…

Some of JBL’s Link wireless speakers have won awards from Sound+Image; they’ve combined impressive sound with their powerful combination of the wireless ‘Link’ (in addition to mere Bluetooth streaming) plus the presence of built-in Google Assistant for voice control and queries, and the ability to ‘cast’ to them from your home network and to stream from internet services. JBL’s Link Bar opens up the ecosystem to include a TV audio solution. And there’s a bonus here, as for this application JBL has included a potentially very handy additional skill. Equipment That additional inclusion is Android TV, the smart TV interface which we reckon is perhaps the best TV interface of them all, given it provides access to a huge selection of apps rather than the limited supply available to any…

With a loyal fanbase in the multiroom audio space for more than a decade, Sonos has finally decided to cut the cord and add a battery-powered speaker to its line up, in the $649 Sonos Move. It’s roughly equivalent to the $299 Sonos One in terms of features, sound quality and stature, although it’s surprisingly large, standing about half as tall again as the One, and with a larger footprint. The big bonus here, of course, is the addition of a 10-hour battery life for unplugged performances, so the Move can stray far from a wall socket. Power up The biggest frustration with battery-powered speakers is they’re often flat when you’re ready to walk out the door, meaning the charging options were always going to make or break Sonos’ first…

We’ve had previous articles on the ability of mesh networks to deliver more reliable Wi-Fi, over large areas in particular, by using multiple gateways which can establish the most efficient path to your router and internet connection — if there’s a blooming great concrete wall somewhere in the way, a mesh can get you around that. Mesh systems are more expensive than a standalone modem-router, but then what price reliable Wi-Fi throughout your home? We cited Netgear’s Orbi back then as one of the best options, even though it’s more strictly a hub-and-spoke arrangement than true mesh. But it gains from its Tri-band Wi-Fi, which adds to the 2.4GHz and 5GHz channels a second 5GHz channel dedicated exclusively to the backhaul, i.e. the data going between the router and satellite…

At IFA in Berlin (see news section) we were talking with Jabra’s Claus Fonnesbech at the company’s stand two days before the show opened; he had been showing us a preview of the company’s new even smaller True Wireless model, the Elite 75t, a decisive redesign of the highly-successful 65t but now 20% smaller and offering 50% more battery life. We mentioned having the over-ear Elite 85h model currently under review, and we praised both their remarkable battery life, quoted at 36 hours even with noise-cancelling engaged, and the attractive cloth finish to the headband and earshells — nice styling, we said. Mr Fonnesbech was quick to point out that this cloth was a sonic choice as well as a style one. We were about to interject a cynical query…

Krix first released the Series MX modular screen speaker systems in late 2015 as easy-to-install modular systems designed to be placed behind an acoustically transparent screen. They take many of the principles of large commercial cinemas and apply them to a residential space, with a combination of front LCR speakers and dual subwoofer modules. You provide power (including to the subwoofer modules, which are passive), and add your own surrounds. The first two Series MX solutions, the MX-20 and MX-30, were inevitably nicknamed Krix’s “wall of sound”. The MX-20 is designed for rooms around four to seven metres in length, while the MX-30 is designed for rooms from five to 14 metres in length. But could this solution work in smaller spaces? “After many requests from dealers and end-users”, says…

Samsung, even more so than Sony, has products for every corner of the home, every aspect of your life, and Benjamin Braun, Samsung’s European Marketing Officer, thinks they’re all brilliant. It’s his favourite phrase. “You know how you put the laundry on and then find one sock you missed?” he asked the crowd crammed into the press conference at IFA 2019, though many of them were influencer types who looked as if they wouldn’t be seen dead wearing anything so old-fashioned as a sock. “Our washing machine has a hatch you can open to drop it in later. It’s brilliant!” Samsung is a mere no. 2 in the world for washing machines, according to Mr Braun, but it’s no.1 for televisions, it’s no.1 for phones, it’s “aiming for No.1” in…

DALI’s first-ever headphones got their premier public outing at IFA 2019 in Berlin, with DALI’s booth in Hall 1.2 positively loaded with demonstration pairs of these over-ear wireless headphones in their two finish options of an attractive ‘Caramel/ White’ combo or more purposeful Iron Black, with memory foam earcushions and head-shells with an unusual level of fit adjustment. These are, in fact, DALI’s first- and second-ever headphones, since there are two models, the iO-6, which has noise-cancelling onboard including a transparent ‘pass-through’ mode, and the iO-4, which seems to be physically identical but without the noise-cancelling and its controls. While relatively compact they manage to incorporate 50mm cone diaphragms which show DALI’s speaker heritage in not using the common Mylar or other synthetic material, but honest-to-goodness paper/fibre cones. “We approached…

Marantz introduced its slimline series of AV receivers some years ago and if not still unique in this space, it certainly seems to dominate the area. It manages to reduce the height of the receiver from the usual dominant double-height to the lesser level of, say, a normal hi-fi amplifier component. This was originally possible by the introduction of HDMI removing all those four-plug composite connectors, and the rise of Class-D amplification reducing the space for power components and the need for large heatsinks and internal space to cool them. But in addition it has achieved the physical shrinkage by keeping outputs down to reasonable power ratings and carefully choosing a feature set that will fit into the smaller dimension — in particular, the number of sockets that are fitted…

The new Formation suite of wireless multiroom audio really does represent a new age for Bowers & Wilkins, as it delivers the results of combining B&W’s strengths in traditional loudspeaker engineering with the new technical leadership of Silicon Valley company EVA Automation, which surprised the hi-fi world by buying B&W in 2016. The ‘Home’ app which oversees the Formation suite comes direct from EVA, and the six new products (see overleaf) communicate via a proprietary mesh wireless network able to stream up to high-resolution 24-bit/96kHz audio. Hence we might call B&W’s new age an ‘Age of Wireless’, except that wireless operation is hardly new to the company. It’s easy to forget what a leader the company was in lifestyle audio when back in 2007 it introduced the Zeppelin, an active…

The next four articles come under the broad heading of computer audio, and they came together organically by turning up at the same time, rather than being an organised collection with a common theme. There’s AudioQuest’s new DragonFly USB DAC, perhaps the ultimate in domestic external storage from LaCie, a smart speaker which is also part of Netgear’s mesh Wi-Fi system, and we start with Adam Turner’s valiant efforts to get UHD videos playing on the latest version of the Raspberry Pi. Computer audio was seen, not so long ago, as the inevitable future of all home entertainment. I remember the original Napster and LimeWire period when large-scale music collections first came onto PCs and Mac, and it seemed no time at all before Windows-based AV media stations were touted…

The Cobalt is the latest and most premium version of AudioQuest’s DragonFly series of DACs. The Cobalt does not replace AudioQuest’s existing DragonFly models, the Black and the Red. It’s for those who want higher performance and are prepared to pay a 40% premium over the Red. It looks somewhat like a USB memory stick, around the same length and volume as a typical mid-sized one. But it looks much classier than that, with its deep, glossy cobalt-blue finish and backlit DragonFly logo. At one end is a standard USB Type-A plug suitable for plugging into the matching socket installed on most PCs, Macs, Chromebooks, Linux, whatever. At the other end is a 3.5mm stereo socket. That’s suitable for driving headphones and also delivering a line-out signal for external equipment.…

Sennheiser’s third-generation of Momentum Wireless is a major launch from the headphone-meisters given the success of the original and its follow-ups. Surprisingly the packaging doesn’t scream their new-release status, and still more curiously their noise-cancelling abilities get a mere feature point on the box, behind ‘music & calls’, ‘smart pause’, and ‘voice assistant’. Other brands tend to give noise-cancellation naming rights, with an NC in the model number. But with NC now an increasingly standard inclusion on wireless headphones, perhaps the feature count is so high here that their wirelessness is the one that floated to the top. So be it. There is, after all, a whole lot of smart stuff going on in the new Momentums, some of which we’ve never seen elsewhere. Same style, new innovations The Momentums…

Let me say at the start that nothing drives me crazy like seeing vertical format ‘phone video’ presented on a TV screen. It seems like every second item on the news features eyewitness video shot on someone’s phone held the wrong way up. The effect is just like watching through a gap in a paling fence — a narrow slit of a picture that’s mainly sky and ground with hardly any view of what is really going on. Every time I see vertical phone video on television I fantasise about a phone that would administer a severe electrical shock to any user attempting to record video while holding the phone the wrong way up! But now, finally, one manufacturer has come up with a (less drastic) technical solution to Vertical…

I confess that I’ve been a fan of Zack Snyder ever since his Dawn Of The Dead remake back in 2004. Previously, he’d directed only a bunch of music videos. Since 2013 he’s been the guiding hand of the DC Extended Universe, the home of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Aquaman and Cyborg. I’m not a comic-book guy so I don’t know which other characters might be in this universe, but I imagine that there are more to come. This is another one of those movies which I was hesitant about watching, despite it being directed by Snyder. Well, perhaps not entirely. After a family tragedy, he stepped down and although he retains the sole director credit, Joss Whedon finished off the job. Maybe it was that shattering of…

Apparently Mortal Engines is one of those future-world young adult novels, and a fairly recent one at that, first appearing in 2001. There ended up being four novels in the series, along with some distant prequels set in the same universe. It’s steampunk to the core. There appears to have been some major nuclear conflagration in our time. It is now several hundred years later and technology has reverted to that of the Victorian era, although historians seek artifacts from the past so that perhaps more advanced tech can be rediscovered. That Victorian technology, marked by (apparent) steam engines has been super-sized. This movie version opens with the city of London mounted on enormous tracks, chasing down a much smaller community so as to extract its resources. Apparently Western Europe…

Australia has produced a lot of fine movie directors. However, too few seem to make a career of it, with many making a movie or two and then going off to do something else. One of the ones who didn’t was Alex Proyas. After some student shorts, he started his professional directing career with music videos for such bands as INXS, Crowded House, Fleetwood Mac and Sting. After a decade of that he came out with the moody 1994 classic The Crow starring Brandon Lee (who died during the making of it). He followed that up with the ambitious, mind-twisting Dark City, another classic. That got him big Hollywood opportunities, which he seized with I, Robot in 2004. Weirdly criticised for not being true to Asimov’s stories — how could…

MartinLogan will be known to many readers for their electrostatic large-panel speakers which have delivered some of the benchmarks of electrostatic sound over the last 40 years. But the company also makes more conventional cabinet speakers, of which the Motion series brings some of that electrostatic signature in their use of Folded Motion and Folded Motion XT tweeter technology, building on the JET design of Dr. Oskar Heil, where a thin-film transducer is folded to achieve a surface area 8 to 10-times that of a typical one-inch dome tweeter, yet requiring 90% less excursion by squeezing air, like an accordion, with high efficiency and low distortion. When combined with a powerful magnetic motor system, these lightweight Folded Motion diaphragms yield an outstanding force-to-mass ratio — “like a sports car’s high…

There was no avoiding the subject of trade wars at the grand opening of IFA 2019 in Berlin. The CEO of organisers Messe Berlin, Dr Christian Göke, made an eloquent plea against the rising threat in the forms of tariffs and other restrictions which will, he says “hit not just the country where a device has been assembled, it will also hit us, the consumer.” Dr Göke’s remarks followed some fairly pessimistic projections from Hans-Joachim Kamp, chairman of gfu, Messe Berlin’s partner in IFA, noting current growth in the global market for technical consumer goods to be flat. Following +7.2% growth in 2017 and 3.6% in 2018, the projected growth for 2019 is precisely zero, with some sectors, notably TVs, yielding significantly negative figures. In the regional breakdown, even the…

JBL’s IFA launch was held beneath the Berliner Funkturm radio tower in the interconnected standalone IFA home of Harman (a Samsung company, as the signs outside reminded everyone), and while they took a while herding us in, there were no complaints even when a delay was announced (time is very tight during IFA press days) given that this is one of the few IFA launches which is fully catered, and this delay left time for an extra round of drinks. 100 million smiles A warm reception, then, for the news that JBL is about to ship its 100 millionth portable speaker, with some 20 million of those shipped so far being the Flip, and delivering a market dominance close to 33% of the global market. Optimistically assuming that each product…

Only two issues ago we looked at a set of smart amplifiers — boxes which stream music and also provide power so that they can be used as an easy just-add-speakers system solution. An amplifier’s traditional roles are the switching of inputs, the control of volume level and, of course, the power to drive speakers. A smart amplifier adds to these a streaming data connection to the home network and internet. And through this a smart amplifier gains near-infinite possibilities — software control, playback of local music from the network, access to the whole world of internet radio and online music services, some paid, some free. The most successful of that group, though also the priciest at $1549, was the Bluesound Powernode 2i, which has since had an HDMI input…

In earlier days, you might select an AV receiver based primarily on the channel count of your home cinema design, and the best power rating you could afford. With today’s smart receivers there’s a whole lot more to consider, but power and channel count have remained the bottom-line specifications. Or they did — until the latest sound formats declared themselves channel-agnostic; they’ll map the sound to anything. Focal’s Astral 16 has, as its name suggests, 16 available channels, 12 of them including amplification. But it’s what it does with them that counts... Equipment Now, we tend to think of home theatre as being defined by, say, 7.1.4 channels. That’s what’s on offer from the premium AV receivers from some of our favourite brands. But remember, Dolby Atmos and DTS:X aren’t…

It was weird. I’d pretty much got used to living with a 5.1.2 Dolby Atmos system with a Denon AVR-X3500H AV receiver at its centre. I’d gone from 5.1.4 to 5.1.2, and felt there hadn’t been much difference. But when I switched over to the Denon AVR-X6500H, wow. Those four ceiling channels added something I’d been missing. And the receiver added a little something further extra... Equipment Indeed with 11 amplifier channels on offer, you can go full 3/4.1.4 (3 front, 4 surround, 1 subwoofer, 4 ceiling) with this receiver. Even kind-of 3/4.2.4. The receiver supports two subwoofers and can have different delay times and EQs for both, though it can’t assign them separate signals (like front/back or left/right). So the two subwoofer outputs both reproduce the same signal, except…

Starting at $60, the Raspberry Pi is an absolute barebones computer. It doesn’t even have onboard storage; instead it runs Linux from a memory card. And keep in mind it’s BYO microUSB card, USB-C power supply and anything else you want to connect, such as a monitor, keyboard or mouse. When the first Raspberry Pi landed back in 2012 it had barely enough grunt to run a stripped-down Linux desktop but, to be fair, it was never really intended as a budget desktop replacement. Instead, the Raspberry Pi is a building block for a DIY project — think of it as the electronics equivalent of Lego. As each iteration of the Raspberry Pi has packed more grunt, it has shaped up as a handy foundation for a media centre for…

There is an argument that for the truly modernist lover of entertainment, storage is now something which is surplus to requirements. Streaming has taken over from ownership, and if we choose to rent rather than buy our music and our movies, what need then for the capacious hard drive or the networked NAS on which to store those copious files of ownership? It is a paradigm shift the day of which has not truly dawned for most of us. What of your old CD collection — will you drag those out disc by disc, or have them ripped to a drive for instant access? While Netflix and the ever-growing raft of competitors in Stan, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and AppleTV+ offer up instant streaming gratification, downloads legitimate and otherwise have hardly…

We’ve had the pleasure of using these Blue Satellite headphones for far longer than the average review, after a pair of Blue Ellas interjected themselves via our headphone round-up two issues back, putting on hold our review of these wired or aptX Bluetooth noise-cancellers. It was worth the wait. As with those more expensive Ellas, they deliver unusual design alongside accomplished sound. Blue Designs is a Californian company manufacturing in China, though last year it became part of Logitech, which is Swiss… and just to confuse things, we gather BLUE is actually an acronym for Baltic Latvian Universal Electronics. Blue has come to the headphone market after 20 years designing first high-end XLR microphones then well-priced USB ones; it certainly has a penchant for design flair, as well as a…

Well, I’m going weird here. As I commence to write, I’ve just started watching the eighth and last episode of Season 3 of the hit Netflix show Stranger Things... on Netflix. There are no discs involved in this review. This is pure streaming. But Ultra High Definition streaming. Until recently, I’ve been bogged down in ADSL internet, as a good many Australians still are. This was wonderful technology... back in 2006, which is when clueless politicians started promising us the world, and thereby managed to kill the natural organic enhancement in the internet which had been ongoing to that point. But a few weeks ago NBN finally decided to come to my part of Australia, and so my speeds have jumped from below 6Mbps to above 40Mbps. Netflix recommends having…