Editor's Eye

Last weekend I attended the annual Flat-Panel HDTV Shootout held each year by Value Electronics, a small independent retailer in the New York City suburb of Scarsdale. This was the 9th year for the event, one that proprietor Robert Zohn started way back when as a marketing tool, but also out of obvious sheer love for the technology. In recent years it’s grown into quite the industry event. Zohn brings in arguably the most skilled and respected calibrators in the world to tune each of the sets to its absolute optimum image, a team which this year included Kevin Miller of ISFTV and Tweak TV, DeWayne “D-Nice” Davis of A/V Fidelity, and David Mackenzie of the U.K. website HDTVtest. The two-day affair was attended by a mix of industry types and press (including the renown Dr. Larry Weber, a brilliant and gregarious leprechaun of a man who many regard as the father of plasma TV), along with Value’s most passionate customers. For those who can’t be in attendance, it’s simulcast on the web and available for later viewing so videophiles everywhere can live vicariously through the attendees.

Last June, I was invited to a press tour and demo of a new IMAX VR Experience Center in New York City. The company best known for entertaining big audiences with big screens had created a space in the lobby of a popular AMC multiplex on Manhattan’s East Side to deliver one-on-one virtual reality entertainment to walk-in customers. It was their second such facility, after a standalone pilot location in Los Angeles.

Welcome to SoundandVision.com! If you’ve been a regular visitor to HomeTheater.com, you may be surprised to find yourself here, but rest assured you’re in the right place. As a byproduct of the recent merger of Home Theater and Sound & Vision magazines, this new enhanced Website combines the deep archives and expertise of both publications and their former sites HomeTheater.com and SoundandVisionmag.com. Along with a new, shorter URL, former readers of both sites will enjoy simplified, faster navigation thanks to direct-access drop-down menus for Reviews and Top Picks by category.

Take a deep breath and inhale that acrid air, my friends. No, it's not the wildfires burning out west this season, but the stench of fuming Netflix customers as they cancel their subscriptions in droves following the announcement Tuesday of a startling 60% rate hike for the company's popular streaming/DVD combo plan.

Our “Flashback” feature “Speaker Cables: Can You Hear the Difference” (link below) offered as part of the ongoing celebration of our 60th year, is a juicy tidbit from 1983 that proved one of the most controversial articles in our predecessor Stereo Review ’s history.

"Once in awhile, even a blind pig finds an acorn."

I'll never forget when I first heard that expression. I was just starting my consumer electronics journalism career, writing for a car audio enthusiast magazine, a city slicker from New York interviewing a down-home Southern boy about a high-end install he'd done in his old Acura. I asked him how he'd managed to win all these big car stereo competition trophies, and he let loose that platitude as a way of saying, "well, if you work hard enough and just keep stumbling around, eventually you can't help but get lucky."

High-Resolution Audio is inevitable as audio catches up with the quality standards of our time