Audio Video News

How would you like to save money on a TV package from a major cable operator and dump the set-top box at the same time?

Cable companies may soon be competing with local audio/video retailers. <A HREF="http://www.charter.com">Charter Communications</A> will be the first cable provider in the nation to begin distributing the <A HREF="http://www.motorola.com">Motorola</A> DCP501 Home Theater System, at the end of the second quarter of 2002.

As evidenced by the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, plasma screen television sets are steadily gaining market share, with every major consumer electronics manufacturer showing a variety of sizes and features. The thin displays look poised to dominate the market in coming years, providing resolution continues to increase and prices continue to drop.

Both <A HREF="http://www.pioneerbroadband.com">Pioneer</A> and <A HREF="http://www.zenith.com">Zenith Electronics</A> announced new digital set-top boxes last week, as the race to control digital content flowing into consumers' homes continues.

HomeTheater.com has been wearing the same haircut for a good many years now. Introducing you to HomeTheater.com 2.0 really takes me back, as I was intimately involved in the last design updates we did a few years ago, when we added the Buyer’s Guides and built out a lot of the content you see today.

This new design is up to the bleeding edge modern, with chunky images, large fonts and a very clean aesthetic that we think you’re really going to like. But a lot more function will follow the form too.

Chesky Records aims to re-create the experience of listening to live music from the best seat in the house with its new Binaural+ Series of high-resolution 24-bit/192-kilohertz recordings. Specially calibrated microphones implanted in the ear canals of a dummy head are used to capture a “stunningly accurate and realistic” 3D representation of the soundfield. With traditional binaural recordings, which have been around for decades, distinct left and right channels are recorded as they would be heard by a pair of human ears and played back through headphones—left channel to left ear, right channel to right ear—to create the illusion of a 360-degree soundstage.