Innehållsförteckning för September 2018 från Sound & Vision

I’M AL GRIFFIN, the new editor of Sound & Vision. The above quote, from the poet T.S. Eliot, is one that applies in particular to my situation. Back in 1998, I was working as a staffer at Video magazine when it was announced that we would join forces with Stereo Review, our sister publication down the hall. The result of that merger was Sound & Vision. It was a heady time for the consumer AV industry when our first issue launched in 1999. After a long period of development, digital high-definition TV broadcasts were finally hitting the airwaves. Netflix had just been birthed and was starting to mail out red envelopes packed with DVDs. The Super Audio CD format was introduced, soon to be followed by a competing high-res, surround-capable…

S&V: Let’s start with some background on Qobuz, a music streaming/download service many Americans have heard of but don’t know much about. Can you provide an overview? DAVID SOLOMON: Sure, and thank you for the interest. Qobuz is a high-resolution hybrid streaming and download service from France. There will be several levels of service and we’re planning a soft launch at CEDIA Expo in September and coming full force as the official streaming partner at Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in October. We feature over 130,000 albums (about 2 million tracks) in high resolution available for streaming and download. This is on top of the 40 million 16-bit/44-kHz full resolution cuts. S&V: Why Qobuz? What’s the story behind the unusual name? DS: The name Qobuz—pronounced “ko-buzz”—represents the extraordinary power of music.…

OLED ULTRA HDTVS grab most of today’s headlines. And although prices for OLED sets have dropped dramatically over the last year, they still command a high premium. Even flagship LCD sets—Sony’s Z9D line, for example—remain beyond the price reach of many consumers. Sony’s new X900F LCD TVs, which are available in screen sizes all the way up to 85 inches, provide a more reasonable alternative. Choose the 65-inch X900F under review here and you’ll leave the store with a far smaller dent on your credit line than you would when buying an OLED or a flagship LCD. DESIGN AND FEATURES Thin at the edges but nearly 3 inches deep at the center (not counting the stand), the XBR-65X900F is less svelte than some of its competition, particularly OLED models. But…

JAMO, THE DANISH SPEAKER firm whose name rhymes with—well, not “ham-oh,” and not “Hey Moe!,” and certainly not orange—but with, more or less, “ma-mo,” has been quietly busy upon our shores for several decades now. That quiet became a bit noisier after the firm’s acquisition by Klipsch in 2005 (both now part of the VOXX corporate group founded by car-fi stalwart Audiovox). Jamo’s latest oeuvre is the Studio 8 series, comprising a lineup of highly affordable slim-tower, bookshelf, and center-channel speakers featuring a typically simple, not to say stark, Scandinavian design language. How affordable? Our test suite begins with the S 809 HCS system pack ($999), which combines a pair of S 809 towers, a pair of S 801 shoebox-sized bookshelfers for surround duties, and an S 81 CEN horizontal…

NOMINALLY, FRENCH FIRM Micromega would seem a deeply conflicted organization. Is it micro, or is it mega? We may never know. (For the record, “Micomégas” is an 18th-century, ur-science-fiction novella by that most French of Enlightenment figures, Voltaire.) Either way, the south-of-Paris firm has an established record of filling niches in the ever-shifting digital audiophile world, beginning with several notable high-end CD players. Today, like most such manufacturers, Micromega is redefining itself for the post-physical media age: Witness its latest M-One duo of streaming capable, digital-input integrated amplifiers—streamplifiers, as I like to call them. Micromega’s M-100 and M-150 are largely identical aside from output power and one salient feature. The M-150 we’re sampling here incorporates a 2x150-watt conventional Class A/B amplifier, in contrast to the Class D amps increasingly found…

Keen-eyed Sound & Vision readers will note that the magazine’s Perfect Focus section has been renamed Wide Angle. The name change represents a re-jiggering of content: You will now see fewer news bites, and more Quick Take product reviews and event coverage like that of the 2018 Munich High End show on page 26. Wide Angle also won’t be limited to just the print magazine. You’ll find Wide Angle content on soundandvision.com, such as my recent post detailing a visit with Joe Bussard, one of the world’s foremost collectors of early 78 rpm jazz, blues, and country recordings. My plan for the section is to have it connect readers with not just the industry events Sound & Vision writers attend, but things like record shows, music fests, movie fests, and…

WITH DLP PROJECTORS capable of displaying 4K Ultra HD signals now selling for $1,500 or even less, they present an affordable alternative to higher-cost 4K LCOS models from Sony and JVC. Even longtime LCOS stalwart JVC has jumped in on the game, with the company recently announcing its first DLP projector, a $2,500 4K-capable model. What separates the new DLPs from most 4K projectors in the LCOS camp is the way they display UHD. Starting with a Texas Instruments Digital Micromirror Device chip that has a native resolution of 2716 x 1528 pixels, a combination of video processing and pixel-shifting is used to present two half-UHD frames in quick succession. This sequence happens so rapidly that the eye processes a full 8.3 million-pixel UHD image, one virtually indistinguishable from what…

(For the control settings used in this review, go to www.soundandvision.com) The measurements here were made using CalMAN 2018 measurement software from Portrait Displays/SpectraCal, together with Photo Research PR-650 and Klein K-10A color meters and test pattern generators from DVDO (AVLab TPG) and Murideo/AVPro (Fresco Six-G). The measurements were taken in a totally darkened room. 1080P HD/SDR FULL-ON/FULL-OFF CONTRAST RATIO: Unmeasurable (Local dimming on Medium) The measurements were taken in the Cinema Home Picture Mode with the Black Level control set to 50, Brightness (backlight) at 10, Contrast at 85, Gamma at -2, X-tended Dynamic Range off, and using an 18% full white window for a measured peak white level of 42.1 foot-lamberts (143 nits). With a full black screen input, the local dimming shut down the screen brightness to…

GERMANY-BASED ELAC was well known in the 1960s and 1970s for its automatic (Miracord) turntables. The company disappeared from North America in the ensuing decades while transitioning into a major European loudspeaker brand. A few years ago, it decided that the time was right to return to the U.S. market. To produce new designs for that move they lured veteran speaker designer Andrew Jones away from his extended gig at TAD/Pioneer. The ELAC Debut line (now in its second generation) came first and seriously shook up the budget speaker sector. That was followed not long after by the pricier, but hardly pricey, Uni-Fi series. (Reviews of both the Elac Debut and Uni-Fi series speakers in 5.1 configurations can be found at soundandvision.com.) It was inevitable that ELAC would climb higher…

ALWAYS THE PAUPER, never quite the prince. Such was the case for Love, the racially integrated Los Angeles psychedelic/folk-rock hybrid who were always on the cusp of breaking through the ether during those heady revolutionary times of the late 1960s, but just couldn’t totally get there. While the sounds of other SoCal Sunset Strip brethren like The Doors and The Byrds made the leap into mass consciousness, Love’s impact initially came at more of the cult-favorite level—though their multicultural influence has only grown over the ensuing years, especially within the British alternative scene of the early ’90s. The secret sauce of Love’s sonic brew came from the enmeshing of contrarian free-thinking frontman vocalist/guitarist Arthur Lee’s R&B-tinged head-in-the-clouds leanings with guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Bryan MacLean’s more grounded melodic sophistication. That creative amalgamation is…

One of my first tasks after being named editor of S&V was to post a blog on soundandvision.com introducing myself and asking the question: Is there something in particular you would like to see more of in S&V? That post can be found at: www.soundandvision.com/content/begin-beginning. Thanks to everyone who took time out to respond.—AG Voodoo and Woowoo I would like you as new editor to be far more critical of the voodoo and snake oil claims of the high-end audio industry, and of the skyrocketing prices for high-end audio components. You should also make Sound & Vision a journal for consumers and not solely an advertisement tool for the companies featured in the magazine. H. Plebs Via email Congratulations on the new job. I was very excited to see that you…

Q I can’t seem to get clear dialogue when playing some movies and TV shows and am forced to used closed captioning. I believe my problem is caused by improper phase. My home theater setup consists of five speakers plus dual subwoofers that have a polarity switch and phase knob. I’ve heard that the proper way to adjust phase is to play a sine wave at 80 Hz (same as my crossover setting) and then turn off all speakers except the left or right speaker and its adjacent sub. The next step: adjust polarity and phase until you measure the highest SPL level at the main listening position. Am I going about things right? Any other suggestions to improve dialogue intelligibility in my system?AMIT ALCALAY/VIA EMAIL A It’s unlikely that phase problems…

IF YOU WERE AN AUDIOPHILE in the late 1970s or early 1980s—or just a teenager with a fresh driver’s license—the Compact Cassette was integral to your life. While reel-to-reel magnetic tape introduced the concept of the “mixtape” decades earlier, it was not until the cassette’s launch by Philips in 1963 and its later adoption in automobile decks and portables in the 1970s that music lovers got the ability to create personal playlists and take them to-go in a convenient, pocket-friendly format. But eeking out high-fidelity from a design that traded a consumer reel-to-reel’s ¼-inch wide tape and typically 7½ inch-per-second maximum speed for a 0.15-inch strip running at a meager 1⅞ inches per second was not without challenges. Dolby B noise reduction, released in 1971 in Advent’s Model 201 cassette…

FULL-ON/FULL-OFF CONTRAST RATIO: 14,666:1 Pre-calibration measurements were made with the Acer’s VL7860 Rec.709 color preset active. Post-calibration measurements were made in the same mode. All measurements were made using a Stewart Filmscreen Cima 1.1 gain projection screen. The projector’s highest standard dynamic range contrast ratio was achieved with the Rec.709 color preset and Dynamic Black mode active. With this combination, black level measured 0.003 ft-L and peak white 44 ft-L for a contrast ratio of 14,666:1. Contrast ratio in the same preset with Dynamic Black turned off was 508:1. Maximum light output was measured at 110 ft-L with contrast set to maximum in Bright mode with Eco mode switched off. Before calibration, the Acer’s default color temperature preset in Rec.709 mode displayed below-average grayscale tracking, with the Delta E averaging…

WITHOUT KNOWING HISTORY, you might dismiss the Sonos Beam as just another budget soundbar dropped into a largely undistinguished field. But as with most things Sonos, this attractive yet intentionally non-descript oval is significant both for the company and the audio business. Sonos execs have long seen the living room television as the most logical gateway for their wireless multiroom music system. The idea, birthed with the Playbar soundbar back in 2013 (review at soundandvision.com), was to build a Trojan horse whose primary function—fixing the awful sound quality of most flat-panel TVs—would also provide the impetus to introduce surrounds perhaps, maybe a subwoofer, and other wireless speakers scattered about the home for music. After Playbar came 2017’s Playbase soundbase, offered for those who couldn’t wall-hang the admittedly large and awkward…

MORE PEOPLE are listening to more diverse high-resolution audio formats through higher-quality headphones than ever before. But ideas about how to feed those headphones vary. The headphone amplifier/digital-to-analog converter, a popular hybrid product, is among the most tireless shape-shifters on the audio scene. I’ve reviewed Amp/DACs as compact as a USB stick and as big as a full-size rack component. At about 4 x 1.5 x 4 inches (WxHxD), Pro-Ject’s Pre Box S2 Digital falls somewhere in between. You wouldn’t carry it in a pocket, but it doesn’t take up much space on a busy desk. FEATURES AND SETUP You might know Pro-Ject as a purveyor of affordable turntables and other phono gear. But the 27-year-old Austrian company, distributed in North America by Sumiko, also offers what it calls the…