A/V Veteran

I recently visited LG's New Jersey U.S. headquarters to get the scoop on its 2024 lineup of QNED and OLED TVs. Here's what I learned.

Anyone who has read any of my speaker reviews over the past few years knows that my current room has bass issues (the photo here is, sadly, NOT my room!!). Welcome me to the club; rooms without bass problems are few and far between. Only the obsessed worries about a peak at 30Hz, but erratic response higher in the bass, particularly in the 80 to 200Hz region, can have serious negative effects on the overall sound. To little response there can reduce a source's natural weight, particularly on large scale music or home theater effects. Too much and the bass sounds bloated.

Once you get above a certain frequency, usually between 200 and 500 Hz (known as the Schroeder frequency, after the physicist who first identified it and not the Peanuts character), the room's effect on the sound becomes less significant.

The Society for Information Display (SID) presents an update on the many faces of next-gen TV technology.

DisplaySearch is a company that produces technology assessments, surveys, studies, and analyses of the current state of video display technology. Every year for the past four years they organize a two-day HDTV event. This year's, the DisplaySearch 5th Annual HDTV Conference, was held at the Hilton hotel at Universal City, CA.

I could argue that the opening salvo of this report was delayed because I wanted the entire piece, which will appear in periodic postings over the next few weeks, to appear in 2010. Or that I figured no one would be watching during the holidays, tied up as they were with festooning the house with LEDs, pondering whether to send real cards or new e-cards (when you care enough to e-mail the very best), or spending hours lined up for <I>Avatar</I>.

A video projector has long been the gold standard for achieving the true theater experience at home. It still is, but there are limitations to projectors that can compromise the big screen experience with today’s best source material.

The relatively limited brightness a projector offers becomes more significant as the size of the screen and the demands of the source material increase. Unlike in the past, where the desire for ever bigger screens could be satisfied (more or less) even by a less than wallet-choking projector, HDR demands far more peak brightness than standard dynamic range...Flat screen TVs in jumbo sizes have become increasingly common lately, at prices far less intimidating than before. A decent LCD/LED, 85-inch 4K set can be had for under $3500.