Innehållsförteckning för June/July 2022 från Sound & Vision

On The Web Log on to soundandvision.com and sign up for our free monthly enewsletter. You’ll get exclusive tips, news, trends, and reviews from your favorite S&V writers. Customer Service And Subscriptions soundandvision@emailcustomerservice.com Call (800) 666-3746 (international calls: 386-447-6383) or write to: Sound & Vision, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235 Please include your full name, address, and phone number on any inquiries. Bass Evolution THE HAPPY CONVERGENCE of three formidable THX Certified subwoofers arriving for testing provided something of a theme for this issue, one that tied in nicely with technical editor Thomas J. Norton’s overview of the latest version of Audyssey’s room EQ processing, MultEQ-X (see page 48). Bass reproduction has come a long way since the early days of the home theater boom. And when I…

I’d like to tell you about Thomas Yuen. He died recently at the age of 70. I didn’t know him well, but he made a tremendous impression on me. Mr. Yuen was chairman and CEO of SRS Labs. With over 150 patents, SRS was an industry leader in audio enhancement and surround-sound processing. The company’s audio solutions were found in over one billion products spanning home entertainment, portable media devices, personal telecommunications, automotive, and personal computers. It had over 300 licensees and partners including companies such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, LG, Microsoft, Panasonic, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, and Vizio. Tom asked me to do some consulting for SRS Labs in 2008 and later extended an invitation to join an advisory board. From the beginning, everything about Tom was both informal and…

Q I want to listen to Amazon Music Unlimited’s Dolby Atmos music tracks on my home theater system. Here’s the problem: Amazon Music support says my subscription will only output Atmos to my Amazon Echo Studio speaker and a few other devices including headphones. But when I play the Amazon Music Best of Dolby Atmos playlist on my Roku Ultra streamer, the display on my Sony STR-ZA1100ES A/V receiver reads “Atmos” and I hear sounds coming from all the speakers in my 7.1-channel system. This is especially pronounced when listening to the newly released Coldplay albums Music of the Spheres and Higher Power, as well as the re-released Berliner Philharmoniker Legendary Recordings, Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition - Promenade I. Is what I am experiencing through my speakers a real…

RATING LG HAS been at the vanguard in manufacturing “smart” projectors—models that, like more traditional offerings, sit at the back of the room and beam images to a separate screen, but also provide the streaming and voice control features you’d find in any smart OLED or LCD flat-panel TV. In 2021 we reviewed the company’s HU810PW ($2,999), a singlechip (0.47-inch) DLP projector that delivered 4K images via pixel-shifting. Now, we have that model’s sibling, the HU710PW, a similarly featured projector that arrives with a lower 2,000 ANSI lumens brightness spec, but also a lower price ($2,499 MSRP). A key difference between last year’s model and the new HU710PW is the latter’s use of a hybrid LED/laser light source (a single laser to generate green plus individual LED light sources for…

RATING BACK IN fall 2021 Sound & Vision reviewed Rotel’s RA-1572MKII integrated amplifier, an upgraded version of the company’s popular RA-1572. Well, at Rotel the upgrades keep coming fast and furious: Just a few months later, word dropped that the same treatment was coming to products at more affordable price points, with the company’s A12 and A14 integrated amps getting bumped up to MKII status. What’s new with the A14MKII ($1,600), the subject of this review? Basically, the same things that went into the RA-1572MKII: a redesigned digitalto-analog conversion stage featuring a Texas Instruments 32-bit/384kHz DAC, improvements to the toroidal transformer power supply and amplifier gain stages, and MQA support. Otherwise, the A14MKII shares many of the same characteristics of the RA-1572MKII. It’s a relatively basic integrated amp with no…

RATING LET ME state from the outset that I’m a fan of M&K Sound speakers. I have owned an M&K S-150 surround system for the past 18-plus years and have zero desire to change it out anytime soon. The first time I auditioned it in a Magnolia Hi-Fi store back in 2002 made me an instant admirer of the brand, and it took me two years of saving up to be able to afford a full 7.1 speaker package. I fully bought into M&K’s—and THX’s—principle that using a subwoofer/satellite configuration to separate and optimize the reproduction of low frequencies improves midrange purity and accuracy. Also, that filtering deep bass from the main speakers lets you achieve louder playback with less distortion while simultaneously expending less amplifier power. Another benefit to…

Roon Ruminations Howard Kneller’s feature on Roon in the April/May issue was well-written and very informative. One thing he might have added was that you don’t have to use your main computer to run a dedicated Roon core. I have been a happy Roon user for over four years, and three years ago decided to get a dedicated Roon server to free my PC up from having to do double-duty. I bought a refurbished PC for less than $300, put in a large spinning hard drive for music files, and installed Roon’s Windowscompatible server software. This requires a bit more personal intervention to keep the software up to date, but it is pretty easy to do for a moderately skilled home PC user and much less expensive than the Unix-based…

FULL-ON/FULL-OFF CONTRAST RATIO: 5,800:1 The measurements here were made using Portrait Displays’ Calman color calibration software (www.portrait.com), together with a Photo Research PR-650 color meter, Minolta LS-100 luminance meter, and a Murideo/AVPro (Fresco Six-G) test pattern generator. Pre-calibration measurements were made with the LG HU710PW’s Filmmaker picture mode active. Postcalibration measurements were made in Expert (Dark Room) mode. All measurements were made with the projector positioned at a 14-foot distance from a 92-inch diagonal, 1.1 gain Stewart Filmscreen Cima screen. The projector’s maximum full-on/full-off SDR contrast ratio was achieved with the Expert (Dark Room) Picture, Minimum Energy Saving, Dark Room Iris, Auto Black Level, Medium Dynamic Contrast, and High Adaptive Contrast settings active, with Contrast at 80 and Brightness at 50. With this combination, black measured 0.0064 ft-L and peak…

RATING ELECTRONIC CORRECTION for the flaws common to any listening room wasn’t always a thing. My first exposure to it came over 20 years ago with the Snell Acoustics RCS1000 Room Correction System, a complex device that never made a splash in the market before that innovative company folded. It wasn’t until 2002 that room EQ took off with the launch of Audyssey, which was founded at the University of Southern California by USC professors Chris Kyriakakis and Tomlinson Holman, the latter famous for his work in the development of THX while at LucasFilm. By 2004 Audyssey began appearing in A/V receivers and preamp-processors. With rare exceptions, traditional audiophiles never embraced it, perhaps out of fear it would pollute the straightwire-with-gain purity of their setup (and the room doesn’t?). But…

RATING WHEN IT COMES to hi-fi and home theater, I’m a space hog. Some folks zero in on tight, room-shaking bass, others seek immaculate midrange accuracy or high frequency extension with gobs of etched detail. For me, it’s always been about imaging and soundstage first. I can forgive a lot of sins if a system conveys the sense of a three-dimensional instrument, voice, or sound object in the listening room. This is what makes things real for me. Therefore, I was intrigued at the prospect of reviewing Polk’s new Signa S4 soundbar. I’m a big Atmos fan for the format’s convincing staging, and at $399, the S4 is among the least expensive certified Atmos bars you can get. Not surprisingly at that price, the Signa S4 is pretty basic beyond…

The over-ear Alpha’s build quality is solid and rugged. It’s also quite comfortable, with the 40mm full-range drivers surrounded by removable soft earcups with cooling foam. I’m not sure why I’d ever need to remove the earcups, but in this age of hypercleanliness it’s nice to know I can rinse them off if necessary. The band is also padded (not removable) and the headphone lays flat or can be folded up to fit in its included semi-rigid carrying case. The battery lasts up to 35 hours with a quick-charge feature that provides 4 hours of playback from a 10-minute charge. The Alpha features Bluetooth 5.1 with Qualcomm aptX Adaptive for a wireless connection. It also has a 3.5mm analog audio input and comes with a cable for plugging in a…

RATING WHILE WAITING on the arrival of NAD’s C 399 integrated amplifier for review, I checked it out on the company’s website. What I saw there was a minimally adorned exemplar of the black-box design school, with steel chassis panels of ordinary fabrication and a small display showing mostly monochrome text. Yawn. Well, a funny thing happened when the C 399 finally arrived, and I unboxed it. I took a shine to its no-frills, understatedly handsome looks. Sure, there are more strikinglooking components out there with more robust build quality, but they’ll cost you. The C 399 ($2,548 as tested, $1,999 in its base configuration) also surprised me with its plentiful features. It contains a phono stage, headphone output, HDMI eARC port, two-way aptX Bluetooth connectivity, and two sets each…

RATINGS R5t Tower RATINGS D15s Subwoofer EVEN THE most veteran A/V enthusiast is unlikely to have heard of Perlisten (short for Perceptual Listening) Audio, but that situation should soon change. Founded by a group of audio industry veterans, the company was formally launched in 2021. For a new speaker outfit, the number of Perlisten models is astonishingly long and encompasses towers, standmounts, center and surround speakers, in-walls, and subwoofers, all of them engineered in the U.S. and manufactured in China. Perlisten Audio’s offerings comprise two major ranges, the S-series and the R-series, with the flagship tower of the higher-end S-series, the S7t, currently topping out at $20,000/pair. The R-series isn’t quite that hypoxiainducing but still hits a maximum of $10,000/pair for the R7t. Perlisten’s standmounts in both ranges (plus surrounds…

RATING GOT BASS? I do. Boy, do I ever: Monolith by Monoprice’s newest THX Ultra Certified 13-inch behemoth. You might think that a “13-inch” sub would be just a bit bigger than a typical 12-inch job, maybe 15 or 16 inches wide, and perhaps as heavy as 70 or 80 pounds. Think again. The 13THX (what I’m calling it since Monolith’s sub does not appear to have a name per se) is roughly 20 x 24 x 29 inches (WxHxD) and tips the scales at a svelte 153.2 pounds. And that’s the “little one.” There’s also a companion 16THX—yes, with a 16-inch driver—that weighs 176 pounds. The new THX Certified subs, like the rest of the Monolith line of subwoofers, speakers, and components, comes from Monoprice, the direct-marketer that started…