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The Friendly Skies
Thomas J. Norton  |  Sep 30, 2006  |  First Published: Oct 01, 2006  | 

I leave tomorrow for a week in Japan, courtesy of Sharp. We will, of course, visit Sharp factories, but another main event on the trip is CEATAC, the annual "Japanese CES." It actually isn't anywhere near as big as CES, but it is a show with a unique flavor all its own. And while I'm not sure we'll see anything we didn't see at the recent CEDIA Expo, you never know. Products are often introduced in Japan before they're exported overseas.

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A/V Veteran
The Heat is Off: AC Infinity's Aircom T8 Electronics Fan System
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jun 15, 2021  | 
Heat is the enemy of electronics, including all of that audio gear crammed into your A/V cabinet. In the early days of electronic entertainment, vacuum tubes (or as our Brit friends call them, valves) were the thing—the only thing. As one of my teachers once explained, the key to vacuum tubes was the little man with a switch inside. But he must have been sweaty, as a tube device could serve well as a space heater.

Back in the day our electronic entertainment consisted of little more than a radio. The family gave no thought to what was inside until one of the tubes failed, prompting a visit to the local drug store with its tube tester and ready supply of replacements.

Then came hi-fi and an interesting thing happened. Because of the heat issue, relegated largely to the output stages of an amplifier, separates were born. The separate preamp driving an amp on a separate chassis was a popular way to go.

The divide, between separates and the integrated amplifier (or perhaps AVR), still exists today in both the 2-channel and home theater worlds. Long forgotten is its genesis, since with solid state electronics heat is no longer an issue.

Or is it?...

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The Human Visual System: Digital Cinema
Thomas J. Norton  |  Feb 22, 2022  | 
The human visual system is a lot more complicated than we might imagine. A recent paper published in the journal Science Advances (January 12, 2022), Illusion of visual stability through active perceptual serial dependence, by researchers Mauro Manassi (University of Aberdeen, UK) and David Whitney (UC Berkeley), takes this idea a step further. I can't pretend to have slogged through the bulk of this article. The text is dense with the sort of science-speak common to experts in their field of expertise but nearly incomprehensible to the layman (a worldwide issue over the past two years, but I digress!)
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The Maestro and the Cellist
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jan 30, 2024  | 
I've commented before on finding interesting posts on YouTube. Though marred by incessant commercial interruptions (I keep my TV's remote close enough to exit the promotions as soon as possible) that service's offerings cover endless topics: sports, history, current events, music, and much more...Several recent British documentaries, for example, covered the hazards found in English homes of different eras...I recently discovered another far more serious entry. Running for 86 minutes, The Maestro and the Cellist of Auschwitz (a German production with subtitles and translations where needed) covers the very different stories of two musicians during World War II...The maestro of the title here was Germany's Willhelm Furtwangler, arguably one of the most storied and feted symphonic and opera conductors of the 20th Century.
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The Martians Are Coming
Thomas J. Norton  |  Feb 11, 2020  | 
I first saw George Pal’s 1953 The War of the Worlds as an 11-year old. It terrified me, but I couldn’t look away. I wasn’t aware at the time that it was based on a book by H.G. Wells, a story that had earlier been adapted by Orson Welles into a 1938 radio drama. The latter had panicked hundreds of adults. Scared as I was in watching the film, I knew it was just a movie. A surprising number of those 1938 listeners thought the broadcast was real.

Both that 1938 broadcast and the 1953 film insured that alien invasions from outer space would become a staple of sci-fi films. Since then the Earth has been attacked from beyond dozens of times in movies, television shows, and even in a 1978 progressive rock album from Jeff Wayne. The results, depending on individual tastes, have ranged from stunning to silly.

But no serious film fan today can deny that the 1953 War of the Worlds is a cult classic...

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The Night Before Christmas
Thomas J. Norton  |  Dec 23, 2014  | 
(Mildly revised)

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Papa was puzzled, but he didn’t grouse.

The toys weren’t assembled, the hour was late And Ma was exhausted, her patience not great.
The children were nestled all snug in their beds While visions of video games danced in their heads.
And with Ma in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap We were far from enjoying a long winter's nap.

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The Right Stuff and Dolby TrueHD Advanced 96kHz
Thomas J. Norton  |  Feb 11, 2014  | 
I recently completed a review of The Right Stuff on Blu-ray, which will appear in an upcoming issue of Sound & Vision as well as on this website. Since space is limited in my print review, I've decided to dedicate this blog to how I evaluated the 96kHz audio offered on the disc.

Last year, Dolby announced a new variation on its TrueHD audio codec for Blu-ray, a process that uses 96kHz upsampling of the. Its purpose is to eliminate some common digital artifacts (see Geoff Morrison's article for a more detailed explanation of how this works).

The process has only been used to date, however, on a few releases. The Right Stuff, originally released on Blu-ray in November 2013, was supposed to be one them. Through a mastering error, however, the process was not engaged. Now, two months later, Warner Brothers has re-released the film with the 96kHz upsampled soundtrack.

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The Truth About Audio
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jun 10, 2014  | 
Rummaging through my piles of lost papers the other day, I came across the following pearls of wisdom. Nothing on the paper indicated where it came from, or to whom it should be attributed. It has the ironic angle of the late Stereophile founder J. Gordon Holt, but may well have come from elsewhere. In any case, here it is for your delectation. I’ll add my own comments in a future blog entry, but leave this to speak for itself for now:
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A/V Veteran
The TV Supply Chain: Taking Stock
Thomas J. Norton  |  May 05, 2020  | 
We have no confirmed data to show how the current coronavirus pandemic might affect the consumer electronics market. Even experts paid to research such things can only guess, but there’s little doubt it’s effect will be significant.
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A/V Veteran
The Ups and Downs of the Hi-Fi Show
Thomas J. Norton  |  May 31, 2022  | 
Spring is traditionally prime time for the audio industry to dust off the cobwebs and bring out their best and latest gear at a hi-fi show for the public to see, hear, and touch. But the pandemic of the past two years wreaked havoc on the show front.
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A/V Veteran
The Wall
Thomas J. Norton  |  Feb 22, 2006  | 

It was the most ambitious do-it-yourself carpentry work I've done in five years, ever since I covered the windows in my home theater studio to shut out the light and minimize extraneous outside sounds. The latest project involved building a false wall directly in front of an existing wall, not only to conveniently hang an expected ongoing parade of flat panel displays coming in for review, but also to facilitate a planned series of on-wall speaker reviews. There's no question that on-wall speakers are a significant trend, and one that we can't continue to ignore here at <I>Ultimate AV</I>. As for in-walls, well, that's a project for the future.

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A/V Veteran
The Wizard in 3D: IMAX and Chinese and Oz, Oh My!
Thomas J. Norton  |  Sep 20, 2013  | 
I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore. Follow the yellow brick road. And your little dog, too! I’m melting! Ding dong the witch is dead. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

The Wizard of Oz has likely contributed as much to the American lexicon as anything prior to Star Trek. (Just kidding— though “I’m giving ‘er all she’s got, Capt’n, He’s dead, Jim, Engage, Fascinating, Make it so, and I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer” do have their loyal fans.) The movie wasn’t a huge hit when it first opened in 1939, but it made up for it years later, particularly starting in the 1950s when it became an annual TV event.

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Thiel Steps Up
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jan 06, 2017  | 
Thiel Audio normally displays at the Venetian Hotel, the venue for specialty audio. But this year they elected to have a booth on the main floor of the Convention center. It was obviously not a spot for an effective, active demo, but the new, 4-way Thiel 40.3, at $35,000/pair, is a big step up in price for the company...
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A/V Veteran
Tiny Robot
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jan 06, 2017  | 
From a company called ibabylabs (ibabylabs.com) comes this tiny iBaby robot.
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A/V Veteran
Titanic Everywhere
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jan 16, 2024  | 
The subject of the Titanic disaster makes for endless commentary. The ship went down in 1912, but once it was precisely located on the ocean floor in the 1980s the story of its demise has inspired an orgy of new coverage. The star attraction of that coverage, of course, was, and remains, the 1997 James Cameron film, Titanic. But it wasn't the first, or only, film on the subject. There was the 1958 black and white British film A Night to Remember, based on the Walter Lord book of the same name.
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