Innehållsförteckning för January 2019 från Sound & Vision

STREAMING LONG AGO supplanted playing discs as my go-to method for listening to music. Sure, I still have stacks of LPs and CDs in my living room, but they mostly serve as quaint reminders of an earlier time when I would linger for hours in record shops. After music downloading took off almost two decades back (see “Digital Music Players: A Compressed History” on page 17 for an overview of downloading’s early days) and those shops began to shutter, I found myself coming to depend almost exclusively on Amazon to satisfy my physical media-collecting needs. Buying discs online was never as satisfying as visiting shops, but it was quick and Amazon always seemed to have what I wanted in stock. Now that I’ve gone all-in with music streaming, mainly via…

Which MP3 player came first? Technically, the Korean-made MPMan, which was unveiled in March, 1998, appeared first. But the MPMan was expensive, wasn’t widely available, and it didn’t work very well. Only a few hundred units were sold. Announced in September, 1998, Diamond Multimedia’s Rio PMP300, in contrast, cost $199.95, was easy to use, and was packaged with all the necessary cables and software. It also sold more than 400,000 units, making it the first commercially successful digital music player on the market. But the “which-was-first” debate is ultimately superfluous. It wasn’t until a court ruling on October 26, 1998 making it legal to manufacture and sell the Rio and subsequent portable digital music players that the record industry was pulled kicking and screaming into its own enormously profitable digital…

(Some minor changes from the settings used for these calibrations were made in the final viewing tests. For the control settings used in the post-calibration viewing visit www.soundandvision.com) The measurements here were made using CalMAN (www.spectracal.com) measurement software, together with Photo Research PR-650 and Klein K-10A color meters and a test pattern generator from Murideo/AVPro (Fresco Six-G). HD/SDR FULL-ON/FULL-OFF CONTRAST RATIO: Unmeasurable In the Custom Picture mode with the Black level control at 50, Brightness (backlight) at 5, Contrast at 90, Gamma at -2, and Auto local dimming at Medium, the measured peak white level with an 18% white window was 40.7 foot-lamberts (ft-L) or 135.9 nits. (At the default Brightness setting of 35, peak white level measured 131 ft-L.) A full black test pattern was unmeasurable at center screen…

I REMEMBER my first flagship A/V receiver like it was yesterday. It was the year 2000, and Onkyo’s TX-DS989, which sold for a cool $3,200 and featured seven channels of built-in amplification plus support for the latest, greatest THX Surround EX and DTS-ES codecs was every home theater enthusiast’s dream. With rear surround speakers now added to the mix, a home theater could actually match the arrays found in cinemas. It’s now nineteen years later and the home theater market has continued to evolve. Back in 2015, I lowered the ceiling of my theater and installed four overhead speakers to get set up for Dolby Atmos. The central piece of hardware driving my system then was a Marantz AV8802A surround preamplifier-processor, a model that offered 11.2 channels of processing and…

WHEN I WAS a kid, the closest thing my family had to a remote control was me. As the youngest child, it was my job to get up off my butt and turn the knob if someone wanted to watch a different TV channel. Today, it seems that just about any device that plugs in can be remotely operated with a clicker from the comfort of your chair, but a subwoofer? Isn’t that the kind of set-and-forget product that completely takes care of itself? As it turns out, remote control adjustment, a key feature of MartinLogan’s revamped Dynamo line, can be a really handy feature in a subwoofer, but we'll talk more on that in a bit. Sound & Vision’s coverage of the Dynamo series subwoofers, including my own 2015…

Speaking of nostalgia, the October/November issue marked the official conclusion of our Stereo Review 60th anniversary celebration. Many subscribers loved reading about the old days of Julian Hirsch and company—our reprint of the Nakamichi Dragon cassette deck in particular generated lots of reader response. Others, however, chimed in to encourage us to restore the magazine’s print space to other, more contemporary concerns. Starting with this issue, that’s exactly what we plan to do. In the meantime, a former writer from Video magazine, the title that Stereo Review merged with in 1999 to form Sound & Vision, recently shipped me a big box of vintage issues of that publication. If the prospect of reading reprints of articles covering the early days of home video (VHS and S-VHS VCRs, laserdiscs and laserdisc…

Another news item to come out of CEDIA was the debut of a new breed of gear sporting IMAX Enhanced logos. Similar to THX, this is a certification process for A/V components and content that provides consumers with specific performance guarantees. On the audio side, IMAX Enhanced A/V receivers and surround processors will be outfitted with a special IMAX mode. An enhanced version of the DTS-X immersive codec, the mode aims to bring an IMAX theater sound experience to the home theater environment. On the video side, a “proprietary post-production process developed by IMAX to digitally re-master content to produce more vibrant colors, greater contrast, and sharper clarity” aims to enhance the visual experience with IMAX certified TVs and projectors. Another goal of certification: to maintain the taller aspect ratio…

My long-running fascination with Sennheiser headphones dates back to the first ones that I bought in 1972: the HD 414 with canary yellow ear pads. I can’t remember how or why they vanished from my collection decades back, so I recently bought an ancient pair of HD 414s on eBay, and the sound was even better than I remembered. I still have the company’s HD 580, which I bought in 1994—another model I keep coming back to. Listening to the company’s relatively new HD 569, I have the feeling they’ll still be cherished by their owners decades from now. They’re that good. Granted, the HD 569 is mostly made of plastic, but it’s rugged plastic, and the black suede accents on the earcups and the memory foam earpads add touches…

FOUNDED IN 2002, Vizio is an American company headquartered in California that aims to offer top-quality TVs at prices that will appeal to a wide range of consumers. Vizio came close to being bought out by Chinese company LeEco in 2017, but that purchase fell through for a number of reasons and the company remains American-owned. HDTVs and UHDTVs are its primary focus, but Vizio also sells a competitively-priced lineup of soundbars. OUT OF THE BOX Vizio’s new PQ65-F1 P-Series Quantum set is the company’s premier 2018 offering. Available only in a 65-inch size, it shouldn’t be confused with the Quantum-less P-Series, which comes in 55-, 65-, and 75-inch screen sizes and is spec’d for a wide color gamut that offers about 93% of P3 color space. P-Series Quantum expands…

FULL-ON/FULL-OFF CONTRAST RATIO: 1066:1 (SDR); 1,725:1 (HDR) Pre-calibration measurements were made with the ViewSonic PX747-4K’s Movie picture 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 SDR contrast ratio was achieved with the Movie picture preset’s default settings and Dynamic lamp mode active. With this combination, black measured 0.057 ft-L and peak white 60.8 ft-L for a contrast ratio of 1,066:1, a weaker showing than other 4K projectors we’ve recently tested. Contrast ratio in the same preset with Normal lamp mode active was 479:1. In HDR display mode, the ViewSonic’s measured contrast ratio was 1,725:1. Maximum light output was 106.6 ft-L with contrast set to maximum in Bright mode with the Eco mode…

DO YOU REALLY need a $5,000, 54-pound, two-channel integrated amplifier? Yes, of course you do. Especially if that integrated amplifier is the new Edge A from Cambridge Audio, a British firm with a long record of seriousness about sound reproduction. Cambridge’s gear has always struck me as a rigorously high-end/high-value proposition, but the Edge A looks, tastes, and smells more like a no-holds-barred statement design, the kind we’re more likely to expect from a company whose bottom line is that they don’t give a fig for the bottom line. But since Cambridge’s new Edge series of components (there’s also a preamp/streamer and power amp in the Edge Series portfolio) commemorates the firm’s half-century anniversary, we’re prepared to make allowances. Let’s begin with the packing materials (something for which I admit a…

COMPACT “BOOKSHELF” speakers have their advocates, but I’ll admit up front that they’ve never been my bag. I guess you could say there’s something about the stateliness of floorstanding towers that appeals to my personal taste. And then there’s the problem of the shelf itself: every time I’ve tried to listen to compact speakers installed in a place where books would typically sit, I’ve been thoroughly unimpressed with the sound. Flat imaging, indistinct bass—to me, those are the hallmarks of shelved speakers. Not a problem for background music, but for critical listening, stands are a must. Canada’s Totem Acoustic is a company that makes a wide range of bookshelf speakers (along with floorstanding, on-wall, and architectural speakers, and also subwoofers). And while Totem seems fine with applying the bookshelf label…

Space: The Vinyl Frontier Ken Pohlmann is a hair less infallible when it comes to analog: In his September 2018 column on cassettes, he said that turntables “don’t work in outer space (the whole gravity thing).” Actually, they’d work quite well, as long as they had record clamps and dynamic-balance tonearms. Those arms don’t depend on gravity for tracking force—they’re neutrally balanced, with tracking force supplied by a spring. Fairchild had such an arm ca. 1960, which they demonstrated by playing a record upside down. More recently, Dual automatic turntables had dynamic balance. Doubtless there are others. Ivan Berger Via email Ken Pohlmann responds: I think Ivan is on to something here! Should we also secure the turntable chassis to the spaceship so it does not counter-rotate against the platter…

Sad news arrived in late October for film fans seeking an alternative to the increasingly original content-driven Netflix: the FilmStruck streaming service was being shut down by its new corporate parent, AT&T. Launched in 2016, FilmStruck was created by Turner Classic Movies to address the needs of classic, foreign, and independent film buffs. It was the Criterion Collection’s exclusive U.S. streaming partner, and also hosted titles from Warner Bros., MGM, Oscilloscope Laboratories, and Shout! Factory. At press time, the Criterion Collection hadn’t announced plans for moving its library to a new streaming home base.…

“An inventor was patenting a means to log on to a central music library, search its contents, then download music files. What a crazy idea.” We continue our discussion with Mr. Pohlmann to get his faulty recollections of his early days at the magazine. Your first Signals column appeared in Stereo Review in March, 1989. Didn’t you get a Pulitzer for that one? Well, no. The lead paragraph noted that the Space Shuttle was in orbit, George Bush (the first) was president, and that Vanna White had just starred in a made-for-TV movie. Pretty hard-hitting journalism, that’s for sure. Unfortunately, the quality of my work has dropped precipitously ever since. Your column has run continuously for 30 years. You employ an overseas sweatshop to write those, right? Nah, I do…

IN MID-2016, Sony launched a new flagship LCD design, the XBR-Z9D. The series incorporated Backlight Master Drive, a local dimming technology that was a big step forward in realizing the peak brightness potential of high dynamic range (HDR). The Z9D series has remained at the top of Sony’s TV lineup for two years—an eternity for UHDTV technology. But it now shares space with the new XBR-Z9F Master Series LCD models, which are available in 65- and 75-inch sizes, along with the company’s new A9F Master Series OLED TVs. DESIGN AND FEATURES The XBR-65Z9F is reasonably thin as LCD designs go, though it’s less svelte than some OLEDs. Its thin black bezel is unobtrusive, and removable covers are included to help hide cable clutter. The feet are widely spaced to make…

Measurements were made using CalMAN (www.spectracal.com) software from Portrait Displays, together with Photo Research PR-650 and Klein K-10A color meters and a Murideo/AVPro (Fresco Six-G) test pattern generator. HD/SDR FULL-ON/FULL-OFF CONTRAST RATIO: 70,800:1 In Calibrated Dark Picture Mode with the Brightness control at 50, Backlight at 50, Contrast at 25, Gamma at 2.4, and Xtreme Black Engine Pro on Low, the measured peak white level on an 18% white window was 141.6 nits and the black level 0.002 nits for full-on/full-off contrast ratio of 1,688:1. With local dimming off and no other control changes, the black level rose to 0.113 nits and the peak white level to 190.7 nits, for a native contrast ratio of 70,800:1. The pre-calibration grayscale Delta E from 10% to 100% was a maximum of 5.12…

ANTHEM AVM SERIES preamplifier/processors have been part of my home theater toolkit going back as long as I can remember. Though they perform A/V switching, audio processing, and video upscaling as well as anything else on the market, the main feature I’ve come to depend on is the company’s proprietary ARC (Anthem Room Correction), a Windows and iOS/Android app that lets you measure the effect of your listening environment on your speakers using either a calibrated microphone or the one built into your phone or tablet. The software then creates correction filters that you upload to the processor to eliminate problems caused by standing waves, reflections, and other room-based anomalies. ARC can be configured to cover the full audio band (the default setting is 5,000 Hz, though that can be…

MAYBE IT’S because our country is still young, but Americans tend to think of the British as having lots of long-standing traditions. Is that impression still valid? These days, Jaguar Cars is owned by India’s Tata Motors. Mini Cooper, Rolls Royce, and Bentley are owned by German companies. Even Marmite, that most British of toast toppings, is half-owned by the Dutch. Following that trend, it should come as no surprise to learn that a quintessentially British hi-fi company like Bowers & Wilkins is owned by a Silicon Valley, California-based startup called EVA Automation. Engineering and design still takes place at the company’s headquarters in Worthing, England, even if most of the actual production now takes place in Asia. Bowers & Wilkins’ embrace of old-school tradition continues with the company’s current…

SET IN the early 1400s, Russian writer-director Andrei Tarkovsky’s greatest masterpiece depicts the life of the famous icon painter, Andrei Rublev. But it also keeps everyday village existence, extraordinary events, and medieval Russian history moving from background to foreground in an episodic narrative tapestry. Princes and religion rule every aspect of Russian life, with motivation for actions stemming from belief in God (or the retribution of the church), subservience, and fear of the merciless Tartar invaders. Faith and art are put to the test in this overflowing epic as the painter travels through the decades of his time. Criterion’s set includes two versions of the film. A new 2K restoration of the 183-minute cut has all dirt, warps, and other damages digitally removed, but enough grain left behind to maintain…