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Audio Video News
2018 Holiday Gift Guide, Part 2
SV Staff  |  Dec 04, 2018
How are you making out with your holiday shopping? Ready for a few more gift ideas? In this second installment of our 2018 Holiday Gift Guide series, we present some of the gift suggestions that have hit our inboxes over the past couple of weeks. Unless otherwise noted, we haven’t done any hands-on testing, so be sure to check return policies and, if possible, take items of interest for a spin. Happy shopping!
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Audio Video News
KEF Blows Out LS50 Speaker for the Holidays
SV Staff  |  Dec 04, 2018
KEF has knocked 33% off the price of its LS50 bookshelf speaker through the end December.
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Audio Video News
Best Gear of November 2018
SV Staff  |  Dec 03, 2018
Beyond an abundance of turkey and great Black Friday deals, the month of November produced a handful of Sound & Vision Top Picks, starting with two state-of-the-art audio components — one a processor for home theater enthusiasts in search of the very best surround sound has to offer, the other a high-performance integrated amp that will leave audiophiles drooling. From there, we move on to audiophile-caliber headphones that can be had for far less than you might expect and Sony’s latest and most affordable take on native 4K video projection.
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Audio Video NewsNew Products
Samson Introduces $120 Desktop Speaker System
SV Staff  |  Dec 03, 2018
Samson, the Hicksville, NY-based audio company best known for its professional studio monitors and Hartke-brand bass amplifiers, recently expanded its line of MediaOne studio monitors with an affordable set of compact powered speakers designed for desktop applications.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
John Lennon: Imagine - The Ultimate Edition
Mike Mettler  |  Nov 30, 2018
Performance
Sound
“Imagine there’s no heaven. It’s easy if you try.” That profound statement set the table for the visceral round of revelations John Lennon had in store for us on his second proper solo album following his departure from The Beatles, September 1971’s Imagine. Whereas “God,” the critical denouement on Lennon’s galvanizing December 1970 solo debut Plastic Ono Band, served as a gasp-inducing, barrier-breaking declarative manifesto, “Imagine” proffered more of a “what if” scenario that embodied an inclusively universal yet concurrently subversive scope.
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Blu-ray Movie Reviews
The Tree Of Life
Josef Krebs  |  Nov 30, 2018
Picture
Sound
Extras
Writer-director Terrence Malick’s remarkable, poetic The Tree of Life tells the story of a family in 1950s Texas and the impact that losing a son has on them. Using a stream-of-consciousness flow of images and sounds, the film authentically captures a childhood remembered by centering on the lyrical day-to-day, moment-by-moment experiences of the two surviving young brothers. The film examines, from many angles, the questioning of God and the meaning to life in an evolutionary sense. Relationships with Him are expressed in whispered voiceovers and through a long sequence that visualizes the creation of the world.
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Audio Video NewsNew Products
GoldenEar Launches Less Expensive Follow-Up to its Flagship Triton Reference
SV Staff  |  Nov 29, 2018
GoldenEar Technology has introduced a slightly scaled-down, less expensive follow-up to its flagship Triton Reference speaker, one of Sound & Vision’s 2017 Top Picks of the Year.
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Ask S&V
How Can I Create a Stealth Setup for Playing Discs on 2 Wall-Mounted TVs?
Al Griffin  |  Nov 29, 2018
Got a tech question for Sound & Vision? Email us at AskSandV@gmail.com

Q I am planning to buy two TVs, a 65-inch LG OLED and a 49-inch Samsung LCD, both of which will be wall-mounted. I also want the option to play Blu-ray discs and DVDs with both TVs. My initial plan was to buy disc players and hide them behind the wall-mounted sets, but I can’t find a player with a vertical orientation. My goal is to see nothing but the TV on the wall. The one option I’m contemplating at this point is sticking a PlayStation 3 Super Slim game console behind the TV. Do you have any other suggestions? —Steve Knot, via email

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Throwback Thursday
Flashback 1996: U.S. Grants MP3 Patent
SV Staff  |  Nov 29, 2018
Twenty-two years ago this week, few people noticed an event that would forever change the course of distributed music when Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute was awarded a U.S. patent for a ground-breaking “digital encoding process” known as MPEG Audio Layer III, a.k.a. MP3.
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SmartStream
Hands On: Fire TV Cube - A Cross Between Amazon Echo and Fire TV
Barb Gonzalez  |  Nov 28, 2018
Although the Fire TV Cube was released by Amazon in June, it has not yet received the recognition or hype it deserves. The Cube is a cross between a smart speaker and a Fire TV media player. Like an Amazon Echo speaker, the Cube can hear commands from across the room and has a built-in speaker to play back its reply. Like a Fire TV media player, it streams from all the same apps as other Fire TV models and can play 4K HDR content.
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