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3D Blu-ray Movie ReviewsBlu-ray Movie Reviews
The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Chris Chiarella  |  Nov 25, 2014
Picture
3D-ness
Sound
Extras
Peter Parker’s a recent high school graduate with an awesome girlfriend and—thanks to a bite from an experimental spider—has become the super-powered guardian angel of New York City, and quite the folk hero. But Pete’s good fortune seldom lasts, and the return of his boyhood chum Harry Osborn quickly takes a dark turn—or is that just the new villain Electro sucking all the juice out of the Big Apple?
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Audio Video News
AMC Upsizes Moviehouse Seating
Mark Fleischmann  |  Nov 25, 2014
Desperate to reverse declining movie attendance, the AMC theater chain plans to install reclining seats in 1,800 of its 5,000 theaters. The seats are so big that they had to remove up to two-thirds of seating capacity, leaving some theaters with as few as 70 seats. But attendance has shot up 80 percent in the renovated moviehouses, with box-office revenue rising 60 percent, and that may save theaters that were already losing money.
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Ask S&V
What Can I Do When Movie Dialogue Gets “Lost”?
Al Griffin  |  Nov 25, 2014
Got a tech question for Sound & Vision? Email us at AskSandV@gmail.com

Q I plan to buy a KEF R300 surround speaker system and an Anthem MRX 310 AV receiver and use the system almost exclusively for watching movies. I’m getting older, and movie dialogue sometimes gets lost. (My wife says I don’t listen sometimes, but that is another subject.) What are your thoughts and recommendations here? —Michael Wood / via e-mail

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Audio Video News
2014 Holiday Gift Guide
Bob Ankosko  |  Nov 24, 2014
Forget the slippers, ties, socks, and countless other predictably boring gifts. Be a holiday hero and shower your loved ones with entertainment and technology. Here we present a dozen amazing gifts for your consideration. At prices ranging from $30 to $400, we hope you’ll be able to find a match or two for the special folks on your holiday shopping list. Worst case, you’ll come up with a few ideas for yourself.
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Soundbar ReviewsGrace Notes
Hands On: JBL Cinema Base Soundbar
Leslie Shapiro  |  Nov 24, 2014
Home theater fashion comes and goes, with almost as much regularity as hemline heights and tie widths. Years ago, massive speaker arrays were in vogue, then tiny little home-theater-in-a-box cubes, and more recently, skinny little soundbars. The problem with soundbars was two-fold. First, they blocked the lower portion of some TV sets. Second, and more importantly, they tended to sound as thin as they looked—requiring a separate subwoofer to get any type of bass response. JBL has an elegant solution with the Cinema Base Soundbar with built-in subwoofer, Bluetooth, HDMI and optical inputs.

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Remotely Possible
Giving Thanks for My Smart Home
Darryl Wilkinson  |  Nov 24, 2014
If only my smart home could cook turkey without drying it out...
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Tech2
Parrot Zik 2.0: So Much Potential, Potentially Wasted
Lauren Dragan  |  Nov 21, 2014
I am not a luddite. I love buttons that make things happen. I love touch screens, I love customization, I love the newest thing. So it would only seem natural that I would love the newest addition to the Parrot family, the Zik 2.0 headphones. They are a tinkerer’s headphone. Touchpad earcups, customizable sound, active noise cancellation, Bluetooth… if there’s a headphone feature available, the Zik 2.0 have it. And yet, despite all of these wonderful features, I can’t recommend them. And it breaks my heart.
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Editor's EyeTrack One
Atmos vs. Auro: How High Can You Get?
Rob Sabin  |  Nov 21, 2014
This year’s CEDIA Expo in Denver could have been dubbed “Dolby Atmos Expo,” with no fewer than a dozen active demos at the show including Dolby’s own. It makes sense that CEDIA would be the Atmos coming-out party. As compelling as Atmos can be (check out Dan Kumin’s impressions of our first Atmos system), I’m of the mind that the customer shopping for a soundbar isn’t about to toss that idea in favor of a discrete component system just because he’s heard Atmos. On the other hand, custom integrators building media and theater rooms are in good position to bump what would have been a conventional 5.1-channel or 7.1-channel system to a 5.1.4- or 7.1.4-channel Atmos system. They, along with enthusiasts like you and me who map our own upgrade paths, will drive this market.
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SmartStream
Hands On: Amazon Echo, A Bluetooth Speaker You Can Talk To
Barb Gonzalez  |  Nov 19, 2014
The Amazon Echo is a voice-controlled bluetooth speaker with Siri-like abilities to answer questions, read the news, give a weather forecast and more. Here's a surprising hands-on account with the Echo.
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Other TechAudio Video News
Atmos, Here: Sound & Vision's First Foray Into Object-Based Sound
Daniel Kumin  |  Nov 19, 2014
Dolby Atmos, the latest, “object-oriented” surround sound solution magicked up by the San Francisco technologists, has earned enough ink here and elsewhere that many of us are passingly familiar with it already. Briefly, then, object-oriented means that instead of panning discrete effects or overall mixes to left, center, right, or various surround channels, sound designers and producers can now direct sounds through a virtual listening space, letting the computer work out the details. Ultimately, of course, whether at the theater or at home, sounds still emanate from physical loudspeakers driven by physical amplifier channels, so there’s a certain amount of semantics at play here. But Atmos is scalable: A commercial theater can have as many as 64 discrete, individually addressable loudspeakers, including multiple “height” speakers in the ceiling.
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