Fred Manteghian Blog

2005 is a banner year for air travel for me. I’ve flown to Indianapolis for CEDIA, California for a cousin’s wedding and Florida four times for vacations and business. I know, I’m hardly a jet-setter or one of many people I meet in my travels who earn my sympathy for being away from home more than they’re not, but still, for <i>me</i>? A banner year.

There are countless major music studios that have not transitioned successfully to the Digi-Tools age of computers. JVC Victor is not one of them. Getting into their elevator for a music tour, a philosophy that will become clearer as the tour continues is printed on the inside of the elevator so that all visitors and employees can read and remember it in moments when nothing else might be going on.

My month-old laserdisc player blog ( <a href="http://blog.ultimateavmag.com/fredmanteghian/things040806/" target=new> Things To Do with Your Laser Disc Player When You're Dead </a>) is still generating traffic as recently as yesterday. Thanks for your comments. It's nice to know I'm not alone in the Ether(net).

I missed a live demo of JVCs new 3-chip 1080p D-ILA (variant of LCOS) projector in CEDIA a few weeks ago by mere minutes. This time they were showing it in comparison with to their older 720p DLA-HX1 projector. No doubt that 1080p is sharper, but that was only the beginning. The new projector is also several factors better, subjectively, in areas of color saturation and blackness. More impressively, the light output on a 115" (diagonal) screen was exhilerating! You can really get a big screen with one of these.

Shortly after "Austin Powers" was released on DVD, I bought a Dwin CRT projector. I won't confirm or deny if the two events are related. In order to mount the projector, I had the low bidders cut holes in my "cottage cheese" ceiling for snaking video cable and power to that most unnatural of spots, the middle of my ceiling. I've been living with the patched up results for years. Only through a decade of burning toast in the adjoining kitchen has the ceiling in the home theater begun to uniformly discolor enough to diminish the starkness of the patch job. Now that I want to mount my new JVC projector, the prospect of letting the Butchers of Sheetrock back into my house is unappealing.

The Plasma Display Coalition (PDC), a consortium of well known plasma manufacturers, is high on life. According to Coalition’s President Jim Palumbo, 2006 will see over three million plasma sets sold to consumers. So why are coalition members Hitachi Home Electronics, LG Electronics USA, Panasonic Corporation of America, Pioneer Electronics (USA) and Samsung Electronics USA going on the defensive? That’s easy, just ask any of the ill-trained sales employees at the big consumer electronic chains to tell you the difference between plasma and LCD panels, and they’ll blurt out urban legend like it’s going on sale.

Out with the old and in with the new.