Innehållsförteckning för January 2017 från Sound & Vision

ULTRA HD SETTLES IN And with it, UHD Blu-ray and HDR. As we were going to press with this Ultra HDTV–focused issue, representatives of the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), the consortium of technology companies and Hollywood studios responsible for developing the optical disc format, came to a hotel suite in New York to promote UHD and HDR while putting the PR spin on why we still need silvery movie platters in this age of streaming. Of course, as the editor of S&V, I needed no persuasion. But they shared some interesting updates on the march of UHD and UHD BD into the market, and the current environment for streaming 4K content to homes. Here are a few tidbits: • As of early November, UHD TV shipments for 2016 were estimated…

Focal Elear Headphones PRICE $999 I’M A LUCKY GUY; I’VE HEARD almost all of the best headphones currently on the market, but I wasn’t expecting something in that league from Focal. I’ve enjoyed their Spirit headphones for years, but Elear is radically different from what came before. The most remarkable thing about the sound is that it’s not so easy to get a handle on. I will say this, though: Elear is hypertransparent, so you feel like you’re hearing a direct feed from the recording session. Build quality, design, and comfort are fully commensurate with the $999 price. They’re beautifully crafted and a pleasure to use. The Elear and the top-of-the-line Utopia headphones were designed from the ground up by Focal, with tooling developed by Focal engineers in a process…

LG 65UH8500 LCD Ultra HDTV RATING LG 65UH8500 LCD Ultra HDTV 2D Performance 3D Performance Features Ergonomics Value PRICE $1,700 YEAR AGO, I TESTED THE LG 65UF9500, an LCD Ultra HDTV that retailed for $2,999, and I criticized it for offering no future-readiness for soon-to-emerge high dynamic range (HDR) content. Since then, Ultra HD Blu-ray has come to market, bringing HDR along with it, and there’s a growing library of HDR movies available for streaming. To LG’s credit, their line of so-called Super UHD LCD TVs for this holiday season, including the midline 65-inch 65UH8500 tested here ($1,700), recognizes both predominant types of HDR—namely, HDR10 (used currently on Ultra HD Blu-rays) and Dolby Vision (still only available via web streams). LG is one of only two TV makers to support…

HiFiMan SuperMini Music Player PRICE $399 HIFIMAN WAS FOUNDED IN NEW York by Dr. Fang Bian. The company now operates from China but does not outsource either manufacturing or design. Headphones come from a factory in Dongguan. Music players come from another factory in Kunshan. R&D runs in Shanghai, software is developed in Shenzhen, and headquarters are in Tianjin. Unlike so many storied audio brands that have cut loose from their original motivation, 11-year-old HiFiMan continues to reflect the vision of Dr. Fang. Although some HiFiMan products push past the $1,000 price point— notably, the company’s full-size planar headphones—most do not. All but one of the music players sell for less than $1,000. All but one of the in-ear monitors sell for less than $100. The SuperMini reviewed here is…

E-mail them to HTLetters@sorc.com. Please note: Questions about the features and functions of a particular product are best directed to the manufacturer. Questions about what product you should buy are best directed to a dealer who knows all the details of your system, your preferences, and your personal habits. All submissions are considered the exclusive property of Sound & Vision magazine and TEN: The Enthusiast Network. We reserve the right to edit letters for brevity. Due to the volume of mail that we receive, we regret that we cannot respond to every letter. He Had a Dream As a longtime subscriber to Sound & Vision and its predecessor Home Theater, I sometimes re-read my back issues to see the evolution in audio and visual technology. I recently re-read the June…

Kicker Bullfrog Jump Outdoor Bluetooth Speaker PRICE $400 “THAT’S AN UGLY SPEAKER.” Oooh. That’s not what I was expecting to hear when I walked into the family room, Bullfrog Jump in tow. I like the way it looks. Then my son chimed in: “Well, it does sorta look like a space heater.” Hmmm…. He’s got a point, I thought to myself. OK, so it isn’t a work of art. It’s not supposed to be—it’s an outdoor speaker. And a darn good one at that. The Bullfrog Jump hails from Kicker, the iconic car stereo brand founded by Oklahoman Steve Irby in 1973. Irby invented the self-contained speaker box for cars and pickups and went on to build a company that today offers a range of audio products—from headphones to…

Charlie Daniels is an American treasure. Still going strong on the cusp of his 80th birthday, the man best known for fiddle-driven story songs like “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” “In America,” and “The Legend of Wooley Swamp” has just released a long-gestating passion project, Night Hawk (CDC Records), which covers all different shades of the authentic cowboy lifestyle. From the on-therange manifesto of opening track “Big Balls in Cowtown” to the hard-charging stride of “Running With the Crowd” to an almost otherworldly janglified cover of “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky: A Cowboy Legend,” Daniels ropes you in with his trademark storytelling chops as framed by a refreshingly clear production courtesy of Daniels and coproducer Casey Wood, accenting the man’s still-strong vocals, distinctive fiddle chops, and shimmering acoustic guitar…

Sony XBR-65Z9D LCD Ultra HDTV PRICE $5,500 AT A GLANCE Plus ■ State-of-the-art local dimming ■ Class-leading HDR brightness ■ Above average off-center viewing Minus ■ Price AT THE CONSUMER ELECTRONICS Show in January 2016, Sony demonstrated a prototype of a future LCD TV design incorporating what the company called Backlight Master Drive. We found it dazzling, as did most of the show-goers with whom we spoke. Nevertheless, we all looked at it as a “show car”—something that might appear in a store near you in a couple of years, if ever. Sony has cried wolf before: Do a Web search for “Crystal LED, CES 2012.” But while that remains a dream (at least for consumers), Backlight Master Drive is here today. (Just this past July, on soundandvision.com, we reported…

Yamaha Aventage RX-A3060 A/V Receiver PRICE $2,200 BUYING AN A/V RECEIVER HAS always been a challenge, even to the well informed. Incoming technologies add still more complexity. Sometimes, however, they also generate new priorities and narrow your choices. Sure, Dolby Atmos and DTS:X require you to add more speakers and make your system more elaborate. But if you want to run those formats in their most effectively enveloping configurations, your shopping expedition for a receiver has suddenly become a lot simpler. Within Yamaha’s Aventage line, the RX-A3060 reviewed here, with its nine onboard amps and 11.2-channel processing, is the only model that can run the new height-enhanced surround formats in 7.2.4 channels; only an outboard stereo amp is required to complete the setup. If your goal is a mere 5.2.4…

Anthem AVM 60 A/V Processor PRICE $2,999 FOR MUCH OF THE HOME theater epoch, system builders who (for whatever reasons) have favored a separates-based system— built around an A/V preamplifier/processor and a suitable amplifier or amps—and have preferred such a system over the more usual A/V receiver approach have had, in essence, two choices. They could select one of a few very expensive, esoteric, high-end American or European designs, with the knowledge that they would probably lag a generation or two behind in HDMI version and latest-greatest surround and video processing. Or they could select a latest-model Japanese offering—recently, this has meant, effect-ively, Integra/Onkyo, Marantz, or Yamaha—and get more up-tothe-minute tech and more digestible pricing, at a certain cost in audiophile street-cred and (perhaps, depending on your belief system) sonic…

Control4 EA-1 Home Automation System PRICE $600 ONE OF THE GREAT INVENTIONS of the 20th century, the humble Lego brick, doesn’t inspire much admiration on its own. Take more than 32 million of them and throw in a little imagination, though, and you can create awe-inspiring 1:20-scale replicas of famous American landmarks, including the Golden Gate Bridge, the Capitol Building, and (of course) the Las Vegas Strip. Then set them up together. Call it Miniland USA. Build a theme park around it. Suddenly you’ve got Legoland California. If I were called upon to write a review of a single Lego, there’d be no bricking way I could come up with the concept of Legoland on my own if it didn’t already exist. Reviewing a smart home automation system poses a…

15 Minutes with Cleerline President Robert D’Addario Fiberoptics has been around in audio gear for years. Verizon’s Fiber Optic Service, better known as FiOS, has 7 million internet subscribers in nine states with plenty of expansion potential. Google, too, has been rolling out its Google fiber service in recent years, though on a much smaller scale with limited service in seven states. Meanwhile, copper is still far and away king of signal transmission both inside and outside of the home. But for how long? To get a sense of what role fiber will play in the future, we sat down with Robert D’Addario, president of Montana-based Cleerline Technology Group, an innovator in optical cable.—Bob Ankosko S&V: Cleerline has said we are in the early stages of the “copper sunset,” a…

CEDIA (Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association) is the international trade association representing 3,700 member companies worldwide and serving more than 30,000 professionals focused on designing and integrating technologies into connected homes. Every year since 1990, CEDIA has held an annual trade show attended by manufacturers and integrators alike. This year’s show was held this past September in Dallas and included more than 500 exhibitors (including over 100 first-time exhibitors), featured 115 training sessions, and had more than 18,750 attendees. At the show, CEDIA released its “Size and Scope of the Residential Electronic Systems Industry Survey” which shows control system installations are on the rise, with 86 percent of integrators installing wholehouse controls, and that same group expecting a 20 percent increase in installations over 2015. Beyond seeing a ton…

There are two types of runners: serious and casual. As the latter, I jog weekends outside or on a treadmill to remedy overeating and in pursuit of the elusive runner’s high. A serious runner, on the other hand, is an athlete with charts. Having jogged regularly since college, I’ve run through countless pairs of sneakers and sets of earphones. It’s no secret that music acts as a drug to enhance performance without leaving traces in a blood test. In our Reviewer’s Choice Awards in 2002, I wrote this about the original Apple iPod: “Loading it with motivating music, I set a personal best jogging through the park.” But technology moves on. Hundreds of apps now compete to be your running mate. And like users themselves, the apps typically fall into…

Emotiva Airmotiv 5CH Speaker System PRICE $1,177 THERE’S BEEN PLENTY OF INK spilled, print and digital, in Sound & Vision and elsewhere, about Tennessee’s direct-to-consumer brand Emotiva and the disruptive pricing the company has brought to various audio categories. To date, this has been mostly focused on electronics, where power amps, preamps, pre/pros, and DACs have been offered up for surprisingly small sums that seem to belie their inherent engineering and build quality. Corner company founder Dan Laufman about how he does it, and he’ll enthusiastically share his prior life as an OEM for other audio brands (many of which you know well) and how he’s learned a few tricks about where and how to stretch raw material costs in the most meaningful ways. He’ll go on about the firm’s…

Sharp Aquos LC-75N8000U LCD Ultra HDTV RATING Sharp Aquos LC-75N8000U LCD Ultra HDTV Performance Features Ergonomics Value PRICE $3,200 THE ARRIVAL OF A HULKING 75-inch Ultra HDTV on your doorstep would be something you’d ideally want to coincide with a worthy media spectacle—the Super Bowl, for instance. In my case, however, the delivery of the Sharp Aquos LC-75N8000U synced up perfectly with the broadcast of the first Presidential debate. Lucky me: I got to witness what perhaps were the two most unpopular candidates in history assail each other’s character at near-life-size. I could just mention here that the TV did a good job conveying Hillary’s red suit and The Donald’s pumpkinlike skintone, and leave it at that. But there’s much more to say about Sharp’s 75-incher. First, the LC-75N8000U is…

Elac Uni-Fi UB5 Speaker System PRICE $2,047 as reviewed THERE ARE A LOT OF WAYS TO put together a home theater system. Small speakers—or, as I call them, monitors—are among the best foundations for a multipurpose room that isn’t cavernous in size. The audio industry used to pump out so many potentially interesting passive monitors (not to mention towers) that we could barely review a fraction of them. But with the increasing emphasis today on soundbars and powered lifestyle speakers at the lower end of the market, it’s becoming increasingly hard to put together small-speaker configurations for surround sound. So it’s both a pleasure and a relief to add a new entry from the German manufacturer Elac, which has hired the eminent British speaker designer Andrew Jones to craft new…

BLU-RAY The Night Manager Concierge (Secret) Service John le Carré (like fellow ex–British Intelligence operator/writer/screenwriter Graham Greene before him) has often had his characters blessed by living through interesting times. The stimulating intrigue here kicks off in the Arab Spring of 2011 when Pine, the titular night manager, has learned, both as a soldier and a hotelier, to be restrained, obedient, and able to adopt an array of people-pleasing masks to skillfully supply solutions to others’ problems and satisfy their needs. Pine is handsome, charming, and above all, infinitely capable. He’s the perfect night manager. And secret agent. Debonair and deadly, Tom Hiddleston as Pine carries himself as if auditioning to be the next 007, and—cool and explosively brutal, always in command, and a devil with the ladies—a dashed good…