Innehållsförteckning för June 2016 från Sound & Vision

In June 2006, when the first Blu-ray player was released by Samsung, I was the executive editor of Sound & Vision—the same magazine you’re reading today, albeit under the aegis of a different publisher. Readers who go back those ten years should remember the high-def disc format war, which raged on for about a year and a half following that introduction and pitted Blu-ray, developed largely by Sony, against Toshiba’s HD DVD. In the spring before Blu-ray arrived, I had written our extensive review of the first Toshiba player, the HD-XA1. It was a kludgy computer dressed up like a video component. But despite its quirky and slow performance, it delivered, with the first batch of Warner and Universal discs (including Phantom of the Opera and Apollo 13), an incredible…

Pirate Bay Now Streams torrents in your browser. The bad news is that, according to Gizmodo, it’s in beta, and like torrenting in general, may be illegal or pose security hazards... YouTube Red Originals launched the streaming giant’s first round of original programming including the movies A Trip to Unicorn Island, Dance Camp, and Lazer Team, the documentary Untitled Gigi Gorgeous Project, the TV series Foursome, and the reality-adventure series Scare PewDiePie. A monthly subscription costs $9.99... Philips ColorSpark HLD is a light-source technology that helps projectors muster images three times brighter than conventional LED gear. Hitachi and Optoma are among those using it... 8K Video Production got easier when NTT researchers realized they needn’t process the whole image in one pass. Instead they divide it into four pieces and…

The concept of being a true global artist didn’t really exist until the rise of Yanni, the visionary Greek keyboardist/composer who’s played his own unique brand of instrumental music for over 5 million concertgoers worldwide (and counting). Sometimes, you’ll find him and his top-tier “United Nations” orchestra playing for audiences gathered at international landmark locations like the Acropolis in Greece, The Forbidden City of China, the Taj Mahal in India, and The Great Pyramids of Egypt—the latter event having recently been shot in 4K and coming soon to Bluray and DVD, after a spring airing on PBS. Yanni’s broad sonic palette covers many musical styles— something that’s no accident, given his voracious consumption of music as a child. “I grew up in Greece, so I was exposed to everything,” he…

The watchword for years in the tech world was convergence, as we were promised that audio/video systems were going to become tightly embedded with computing technology and vice versa. This convergence has finally happened, and the computer tech integration into home audio/video gear has spawned a variety of performance improvements and feature enhancements, positively impacting many devices in numerous ways. From network audio and video streaming, to vastly improved digital signal processing, to video scaling that make jaggies virtually a thing of the past, modern entertainment systems are increasingly becoming more like specialized computers with each new generation. Perhaps one of the biggest benefits computing integration has brought to modern gear is the advent of flash memory that can be repeatedly and easily updated with new firmware. Firmware updates, essentially…

PRICE $400 THE VIDEO WORLD, OR AT LEAST the segment that still values packaged media, has been waiting impatiently for Ultra HD discs. Many of us still prefer to pay for our movies once and have them on the shelf. More important, we want their video and audio quality uncompromised by Internet bandwidth limitations. It’s been a long wait indeed, but the time has finally come for Ultra HD Blu-ray, and while its first steps aren’t free of stumbles, I haven’t been this excited about a video development since the first standard Blu-ray Discs hit the market 10 years ago. While nearly two-dozen Ultra HD Blu-ray Discs are available or imminent as I write this in late March, Samsung’s UHD Blu-ray player, the UBD-K8500, is alone in the market. Philips…

NO FORMAT LAUNCH WOULD BE COMPLETE WITHOUT A FEW MOVIES to play, and UHD Blu-ray Disc boosters got more than they could have hoped for, with about two-dozen titles from Sony, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, and Lionsgate available concurrent with the roll-out of this debut Samsung UBD-K8500 player, all mastered with HDR10 high dynamic range. We asked our movie reviewers Tom Norton and David Vaughn for their top-line observations on some of the first batch to help you separate the demo-worthy from the duds. Below are excerpts from their reports (with the author identified for each blurb); the full text is available online at soundandvision.com. Tom restricts his comments to picture quality, while David also shared his soundtrack impressions as heard on his 7.2.4-channel Atmos theater system. Titles are…

PRICE $1,897 as reviewed AT LAST COUNT, 1.34 BAZILLION established companies and crazed startups were designing wireless streaming audio systems. The latest company to toss its Wi-Fi dongle into the steaming streaming pile is Paradigm. Founded in 1982, the Toronto-based speaker company is no starry-eyed Kickstarter sensation hell-bent on streaming multiroom audio using a Raspberry Pi, an Altoids tin box, and numerous references to the Internet of Things. In fact, as well known as Paradigm is, the company should know better than to sully their engineering hands (they actually do build a lot of their speakers by hand in Toronto) with the interference-ridden mishmash of 802.11g/n standards, amplified speakers, audio codecs, sample rates, apps, and “What’s the best router to use?” On the other hand, maybe Paradigm—with its new Premium…

PRICE $300 (500 GB), $400 (1 TB) WITH 412 SCRIPTED TV SERIES originating on broadcast, cable, and online channels last year, viewers face the twin challenges of finding shows that appeal to them and having enough waking hours to watch them. TiVo’s new flagship digital video recorder, Bolt, purports to help solve both problems. An admitted TV addict, I bolted for a Bolt to see if it could rekindle the excitement I felt when TiVo debuted in 1999. Hump Day White and bent, Bolt is an unusuallooking component. Because of its hump, it needs to be topmost in a stack. Included in the box are an HDMI cable and a remote with two AA batteries (also white) that operates in either RF or IR modes (it defaults to RF with…

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. Loony for Loof I just finished reading your Lirpa issue (April) from cover to cover and upside down (I don’t miss a trick!), at which time I began hallucinating and having flashbacks. Years of intensive therapy have…

PRICE $1,099 THE BEYERDYNAMIC T1 (2ND Generation) over-the-ear headphone may look nearly identical to the original T1 that debuted in 2009, but trust me on this: The two headphones sound very different. The first thing I noticed is that the new T1 has meatier, bigger, punchier bass, and the treble is sweeter, clearer, and more refined. It’s much more than a reboot. To discover why, I rang Beyerdynamic’s Klaus Hanselmann to get the back story. He told me the T1’s 45mm Tesla driver is much the same but now features a tiny plug that controls high-frequency resonance. The earcups sport an all-new aluminum driver housing and baffle. The acoustic damping material behind the drivers is also new. The ear pads now have memory foam, and they are covered with synthetic…

The Rise and Fall of Stereo (Part One) In the beginning, Edison created the phonograph, and it was good. It was also monaural. The vertical modulation (referred to as hill-and-dale recording) of the groove neatly encoded the amplitude variations of the analog-input waveform and likewise could reproduce the waveform. If engineers had stuck with hill-and-dale, the world would be a very different place. But they kept tinkering, as engineers are wont to do, and they found an improvement. First, Berliner developed a groove with horizontal modulation. The side-to-side wiggle also nicely stored an analog waveform. Then something really interesting happened. Engineers realized that a 45-degree groove cut using both vertical and horizontal modulation could store two different signals. History does not document exactly what transpired, but I’m pretty sure the…

Tech Played for Laughs The most peculiar celebrity appearance at CES this past January had to be former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden, who beamed in from Moscow on a screen mounted to a rolling pedestal. Beyond a few onlookers standing in the Beam booth as Snowden delivered an extended monologue, 50 remote viewers watched through a Peri-cast thanks to someone pointing a smartphone. At the end of the session, Snowden’s pedestal pivoted left and right to acknowledge the polite applause mostly from employees of Beam, which makes telepresence robots. The scene should remind sitcom gluttons of last season’s Modern Family finale, in which Phil, stranded in Seattle, “attends” Alex’s graduation party through an iPad mounted on a Segway. “Isn’t this great?” he proclaims once too often, causing an exasperated…

High dynamic range, or HDR, is simply a way of more closely replicating the variations in luminance we see in real life. A typical LED-driven LCD HDTV might produce a maximum output of about 400 nits (117 foot-lamberts). Today’s brightest HDR-capable consumer sets can at least double that. However, HDR isn’t just about a brighter picture; if it were, we could simply set our HDTVs to stun (Vivid mode!) and be done with it. HDR offers improved luminance gradations not only in the peak and near whites, but in the dark, shadowy parts of the picture as well. Dolby was the first to bring HDR to our attention with Dolby Vision. But now there’s also HDR10. Dolby Vision is currently offered in a few HDR movie streams (mainly from Netflix…

THIS graph shows the PW Amp’s left channel, from analog input to speaker output with two channels driving 8-ohm loads. Measurements for THD+noise, crosstalk, signal-to-noise ratio, and analog/digital frequency response were all within expected performance parameters. Full details available at soundandvision.com.–MJP SPECS PW 600: 5 in aluminum-cone woofer, 1 in aluminum-dome tweeter (2); 6.5 x 10 x 5.5 in (WxHxD), 7.5 lb; 200-watt RMS, Class D amplifier; Wi-Fi, Ethernet, Play-Fi; 3.5mm analog input, USB • PW 800: 5 in aluminum-cone woofer (2), 1 in aluminumdome tweeter (2); 20 x 7 x 5.5 in (WxHxD), 13.8 lb; 230-watt RMS, Class D amplifier; Wi-Fi, Ethernet, Play-Fi; 3.5mm analog input, USB • PW Amp: 2 x 50 watts RMS (8 ohms), Class D; 5.75 x 3.13 x 8.63 in (WxHxD), 3 lb; Wi-Fi,…

PRICE $1,400 A COMPACT, PORTABLE projector makes sense for a rec room or vacation home where a full-scale, full-time home theater isn’t possible—or even wanted. LG isn’t well known as a projector company, but they’ve been steadily building a portfolio of compact projector options over the past few years. Last year, I checked out the PF85U (soundandvision.com), a 1080p model with an array of smart features, including Web browsing and Netflix streaming. This time around, I’m looking at LG’s PF1000U, another 1080p DLP model packed with an array of smart/streaming features. A key difference between the PF1000U and its predecessor is that the new model is an ultra short throw projector designed for close placement to a screen rather than on a tabletop 10 feet away. This type of setup…

PRICE $7,000 WHEN NEW JVC PROJECTORS were announced at this past October’s CEDIA, they basically looked the same as the models from two years ago, with only some modest differences visible on paper in the brightness rating plus support for the latest version of HDCP. But in use, the new DLA-X750R features some significant upgrades from the outgoing DLA-X700R. Let’s dive in and see how JVC delivered one of the best projectors I’ve reviewed to date. Inner Beauty As noted, the DLA-X750R (available through custom installers as the DLA-RS500) is outwardly identical to the DLA-X700R, with the same flaked black-gloss finish, motorized lens cover, and connection ports. There are no legacy analog inputs; only two HDMI ports that are now full 18-gigabit-per-second HDMI 2.0a inputs with full support for HDCP…

Harman International, the multi-billion-dollar company that supplies infotainment technology to automakers and owns such storied audio brands as JBL, Infinity, Revel, Mark Levinson, and Lexicon, dates back to 1953 when Sidney Harman and Bernard Kardon founded one of audio’s most iconic brands, Harman Kardon. The pioneering brand, which introduced the world’s first hi-fi (and later stereo) receiver, started with a commitment to pursue high-quality sound. That commitment endures through the work of Sean Olive, a 23-year Harman veteran. In his current role as Acoustic Research Fellow, Olive leads studies related to the perception and measurement of sound quality and is responsible for sound quality benchmarking of Harman’s audio systems. He is a past president of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) and, prior to joining Harman, was a scientist at Canada’s…

New TV Tech I enjoyed reading the feature “The New TV Tech” in S&V (January 2016), which discussed technology to bring extended color to TVs. Here’s my question: Is extended color new? My current set already offers that feature by being Deep Color and xvYCC compatible. I thought the deal was that few people could notice the difference, and extended color didn’t catch on. What’s really new this time around? Doug Allred / Jamestown, NC The specs for your current TV might indicate an ability to display extended color, but that doesn’t mean you’ve viewed extended color on it or that it’s even capable of displaying an extended color gamut. Confused? Let me explain. TVs with HDMI 1.3 connections—the first HDMI version to incorporate greater than 8-bit color reproduction (a.k.a.…

PRICE $3,995 THE UBER HEADPHONE FIELD IS getting mighty crowded—we have the Abyss AB-1266 ($5,495), Hifiman HE1000 ($2,999), Stax SR 009 ($3,999), Sennheiser Orpheus ($55,000!)—and now we have Audeze’s latest, the LCD-4 ($3,995). Talk about sticker shock! But let’s put those prices in perspective: All of them put together cost far less than a single Wilson Audio Alexandria XLF speaker, which sell for upwards of $200,000 per pair. So, as extreme as toptier headphone price tags have become, most are still within reach of a vastly larger group of enthusiasts than the very best high-end speakers. By that criterion, uber ’phones like the LCD-4 are comparatively affordable. Expensive, yes, but the best stuff always is. AT A GLANCE + Plus ■ Audeze ups their game, again! ■ Solid build quality…

A precise comparison between an HDR UHD movie and its 1080p Blu-ray release was impossible without an identical second display (and even then, that set’s 2K-to-4K upconversion would add another variable). Even so, I couldn’t resist comparing an HDR UHD Blu-ray, played on the Samsung player into the Samsung 4K set, with the equivalent 1080p Blu-ray using my Oppo BD-105D (with Darbee enhancements off) and my 1080p reference display, the Panasonic TC-65ZT60 plasma. To match the two displays as closely as possible in subjective average brightness, I put the Panasonic’s Panel Brightness on High (normally it’s on Medium) and advanced its Contrast control several steps above optimum. I again chose to sit a bit further from the sets than theory suggests for a UHD source (but no further than most…

FOR the picture settings plus additional details on calibration and video-processing tests for this review, go to soundandvision.com/Test Bench. FULL-ON/FULL-OFF Contrast Ratio: 381:1 PRE-CALIBRATION measurements were made in the Cinema mode at the default settings. Post-calibration measurements were made in the Expert mode. The LG’s black level measured 0.032 ft-L and peak white 12.2 ft-L, for a contrast ratio of 381:1. Highest peak brightness was delivered by the default settings in the Sports mode: 15.22 ft-L. In this mode, the LG’s black level measured 0.030 ft-L, for a contrast ratio of 507:1. BEFORE calibration, the LG’s Warm color temperature preset displayed a strong blue bias at all IRE levels. The Delta E of its pre-cal grayscale averaged out to 15.6; calibration improved that number significantly to 2.8, with a high…

FULL-ON/FULL-OFF Contrast Ratio: 512,000:1 (approx.) ALL of the measurements were taken with the projector in the User 1 preset and the lamp in low. The gamma correction preset was selected as Custom 1 (2.4), which measured nearly ruler-flat at 2.4. All of the calibration was done with the lens aperture in –10 and the Intelligent Aperture disabled, and the contrast ratio measurements were done in a variety of different modes for the aperture as noted in the review. The lamp had 74 hours on it during the calibration. All viewing and measurements were done on a 120-inch-diagonal Stewart Filmscreen StudioTek 100 screen (1.0 gain). THE full-on/full-off contrast was measured with a Minolta T-10 meter at 4 inches away from the lens face. I tested the projector in low lamp mode…