Innehållsförteckning för October 2016 från Sound & Vision

This issue includes reviews of two displays boasting HDR, or high dynamic range playback. Tom Norton, in his review of Samsung’s latest flagship flat panel, raves about his HDR experience. Al Griffin, specifically discussing HDR in his review of Epson’s excellent new 4K-compatible projector, in essence says, “Umm...it’s OK.” So, the question for the confused reader is this: Is HDR worth it? Is it worth a display upgrade, buying perhaps a new UHD Blu-ray player, or seeking out and purchasing the still pricey (by disc or streaming) specialized software? Or is HDR just another in a long line of largely inconsequential technologies and features hoisted upon the public? Most often, the response to this question for this or any other technology really does depend. It depends, for example, on the…

The Netflix Binge Scale measures series likely to be consumed in a single week. At the top end are thrillers like Breaking Bad and Dexter, while political dramas like House of Cards and The West Wing are watched over a longer period. UltraFlix brings UHD and HD streaming to partnering smart TVs (from Hisense, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Vizio) and media players (Roku 4). It offers more than 1,000 hours of movies, shows, sports, concerts, and documentaries... Smart TVs Accounted For nearly half of those shipped in the fourth quarter of 2015, says an IHS Technology report. The category passed the 100 million mark at the same time... Google Cast Is Emerging as a leading smart TV platform, replacing homegrown alternatives. It has been adopted by Vizio, Magnavox, Philips, and Westinghouse...…

Living With Robots When you’re constantly surrounded by technology and automation, you tend to take things for granted, just accepting all the cool stuff happening around you as normal. It isn’t until someone who doesn’t live with this stuff on a daily basis comes over and points out all the stuff that happens in our house as different and special that we pay attention to it and realize how awesome it is. Recently, my wife’s sister and her kids came to visit for a few days and constantly noticed all the things that just happen “automagically” in our house. “What was that noise?” “Oh, that was the back door. It automatically locks itself after two minutes.” “What’s happening with the windows?” “That’s our motorized shades. They automatically close every day…

EPSON’S 6040UB IS THE FLAGSHIP MODEL in the company’s new, improved Pro and Home Cinema projector lineup. In this case, when Epson claims new and improved, they mean it. Along with accepting 4K-format signals, the entire model range is compatible with high dynamic range content (HDR10) and incorporates a number of enhancements to optimize the resolution, brightness, and contrast of images. Color reproduction also gets a boost in the new projector lineup, with full coverage of the DCI (P3) color space and improved edge-to-edge color uniformity. While the 6040UB and kin don’t use native 4K imaging chips, they do take advantage of the 4K Enhancement technology first introduced by Epson for its PowerLite Pro Cinema LS10000, a laser-based LCD projector that Sound & Vision reviewed in November 2015. Similar to…

PSB Imagine X Speaker System PRICE $3,443 as reviewed IT’S A FACT THAT GOOD loudspeakers sound more alike than different. After all, they’re trying to accomplish the same task: reproduce the recording presented to their inputs with as little change, whether reduction or addition, as possible. PSB speakers are good loudspeakers. Thus, thanks to the transitive property we all learned in middle school, one PSB model should sound very much like another PSB model, with allowances made for size, price, and range. It follows that PSB’s new mini-tower in their Imagine X series, the X1T, should sound like the full-sized and vastly more expensive Imagine T3 (Sound & Vision, September 2015, and soundandvision.com). But I’m getting ahead of myself. The Canadian loudspeaker stalwart sent us a complete, Dolby Atmos– ready…

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. Calibrating for HDR In more than one recent TV review, your publication refers to the difficulties with calibrating UHD HDR screens and mentions that test discs aren’t available yet. Can you perhaps explain one matter to this…

All Men Shall Become Brothers All men shall become brothers. At least that’s what Schiller proposed in his Ode to Joy, a proposal tunefully endorsed by Beethoven. In practice, we sometimes act more like distant cousins, or like neighbors who scream at each other and throw dog poop on each other’s lawns because one guy votes democrat and the other votes republican. Local law enforcement knows who we are. And then there’s analog audio guys and digital audio guys. The sometimes bitter relationship between Grooves and Bits makes the Crips versus the Bloods look like a bromance. Sometime, somewhere, at probably around 2:00 a.m. in a bar, maybe somebody will explain to me why such a trivial thing like music storage media invites such acrimony. Meanwhile, the war rages on.…

Fall TV: It’s Back to the Past Maybe it’s because the broadcast networks crave turning the clock back to when they were dominant that the new season is dominated by series about time travel. NBC has Timeless, a time-traveling drama about villains conspiring to alter American history. Fox offers Making History, a timetraveling sitcom about heroes fumbling their way around American history. ABC tenders Time After Time, in which H.G. Wells travels in time to stop Jack the Ripper. Then there’s CW’s reimagining of the 2000 movie Frequency, in which a police detective in 2016 played by Peyton List discovers that she can speak via ham radio to her detective father who died in 1996. To be blunt, I’m not sure her character would know a ham radio from a…

Epson Pro Cinema 6040UB 3D DLP Projector Better and better. PRICE $3,999 WITH 4K/ULTRA HD QUICKLY taking over as the default resolution for new TVs, it seems ironic that projectors, the display type that would most benefit from 4K resolution, have been slower to transition to the new format. Sony is the only manufacturer to introduce 4K-res projectors aimed at the general home theater market, and with the cost of entry for those models stuck in the $10,000-plus range, it’s clear that 4K projection has a way to go before it becomes mainstream. The 4K transition may be lagging among projectors, but one trend has been on the upswing: faux-K. Projector-maker JVC was the first to introduce models that took advantage of pixel-shifting technology (JVC calls its latest version e-shift3)…

KaleidescapeStrato 4K Ultra HD Movie Player. PRICE $4,495 as reviewed ONE OF MY BIGGEST TAKEAWAYS from the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show was that 1080p TVs are rapidly going extinct, replaced in nearly every size from 40 to 80 inches by 4K Ultra HD models. This was confirmed at this year’s show, where the only non-4K TVs were outliers in the 90-inch-and-beyond region…or the 8K “visions of the future” that manufacturers displayed to prove they aren’t resting on their laurels. The problem with 4K, however, remains content. Now that you can get a pretty sweet 55-inch 4K TV in the vicinity of $1,000, what are you going to watch on it? Sure, there’s a smattering of titles on Netflix and Amazon, but streaming 4K isn’t without its own challenges—or compromises, including…

What Next? 15 Minutes with CEDIA Tech Guru Dave Pedigo Predicting the future is risky business, but in his role as senior director of emerging technologies for the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association (CEDIA), Dave Pedigo is paid to keep a watchful eye on what’s coming down the pike and ferret out the products and trends most likely to impact the tech landscape in 5, 10, 15 years. We recently sat down with Pedigo to find out where he sees technology heading over the next five years. S&V: The CEDIA Technology Council recently issued a list of 100 predictions for the year 2020. We selected a few to talk about, but first tell us about the Council. DP: The Technology Council is a think tank devoted to identifying emerging…

Tributaries Aurora Active Fiber-Optic HDMI Cable The Aurora hybrid fiber-optic cable is the first of its kind to be certified by DPL Labs to transport HDMI signals at data rates up to 18Gbps over cable lengths up to 98 feet—rates Tributaries says you’ll need with Ultra HD Blu-ray content that supports 10-bit color and high dynamic range (HDR). Glass Meets Copper: Aurora is a marvel of electro-optical engineering: Audio/video/clock and control signals are transmitted optically through glass fiber, while copper carries HDCP and other two-way data. The brain of the cable, originally designed for military applications, is an optical microchip encased in the HDMI source-connector. Circuitry that handles signal conversion is contained in the connector head shells, and power is provided a USB 2.0 cable. Price: $1,350 (33 feet), $1,500…

PRICE $4,500 WHEN WE LAST REVIEWED ONE of Samsung’s so-called SUHD sets, Ultra HD with high dynamic range (HDR) was not yet available on Blu-ray. But the arrival of such discs—together with UHD Bluray players like Samsung’s own UBD-K8500—has changed the game. The 4K resolution of Ultra HD sets is all well and good, but HDR is the most eye-popping feature of UHD. Not all 4K sets, however, incorporate HDR, and those that do don’t necessarily perform at the same level. HDR still can’t be done well cheaply; at present, the displays that do it best are their respective makers’ premier offerings. The Samsung KS9800 series definitely belongs in that company—and among the three models within that family, the 65-incher we’re discussing here is the smallest. Features There are two…

Morel SoundWall LCR4 SW In-Wall Modular Soundbar System PRICE $3,497 as reviewed I COULD START THIS REVIEW BY making a comparison between Morel, the loudspeaker company, and morel, the type of mushroom. But someone would no doubt castigate me (or worse) for not referring to morchella, the more technically correct name for morel mushrooms—and therefore, that same someone would deem my comparison to be a mighty poor excuse for an introduction to a Test Report. So, I’ll simply say that Morel is an unusual speaker company, in many ways. Mind you…I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a morel mushroom, but I’ve been told by restaurant-owning friends who are in the know about such things that these wild mushrooms are a difficult-to-hunt, infrequently discovered, gourmet delicacy when it comes to fungi.…

Sony STR-ZA5000 ES A/V Receiver PRICE $2,800 IN ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE’S short story “Silver Blaze,” from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, the great detective has this conversation with a police inspector, who speaks first: “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” “That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes. Just as the dog that didn’t bark enabled Holmes to identify a killer, the features that the Sony STRZA5000ES doesn’t have are clues to its identity. This $2,800 receiver doesn’t have Bluetooth, AirPlay, Wi-Fi, or any other wireless connectivity or network audio option—not even DLNA to work with its Ethernet jacks. That seems an odd omission today for…