A/V Veteran

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A/V Veteran
What Defines a Home Theater?
Thomas J. Norton  |  Oct 20, 2020  | 
The other day I was fiddling with my car radio in an attempt to find an interesting station, not an easy exercise in my end of the woods. I landed on a real estate broadcast. I’m not in the market to buy or sell property, but I stayed with it rather than dial while driving. My car doesn’t have one of those all-singing, all dancing, voice activated in-car entertainment systems—”Alexa, play soft jazz.”

The subject being discussed was what sort of home improvements homeowners were investing in these days. In the current environment it may seem odd that some folks are putting in swimming pools, adding bedrooms, and remodeling here and there. But if it keeps contractors in business and their workers employed I’m happy for them. One question asked of the commentator was if these upgrades included an uptick in home theater installations. Given the current (non) status of commercial movie theaters, this seemed logical. The answer given, however, was a definite no. With the ability to now watch and listen on portable devices such as smart phones and tablets, the responder claimed that some current home theater owners are even converting their entertainment spaces to home offices or other more pressing needs. Yuck.

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A/V Veteran
What HDR Means for Color and Luminance
Thomas J. Norton  |  Apr 19, 2016  | 
What’s a “nit” and what’s it have to do with what you see on your TV screen as we enter the Age of High Dynamic Range (aka HDR) video.
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A/V Veteran
What Makes a Good Center Speaker
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jun 24, 2014  | 
The center channel speaker doesn’t often get the respect it deserves. To keep it slim enough to fit on a shelf, many manufacturers simply offer two-way center designs, laid out in a horizontal woofer-tweeter-woofer arrangement. Every experienced speaker engineer knows that this is the worst way to design any speaker, but cost cutters, marketing departments, and consumers who don’t know better (or don’t care) demand them.
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A/V Veteran
What Price Glory
Thomas J. Norton  |  Sep 30, 2014  | 
The cartoon above is only one of many from cartoonist Charles Rodrigues (1926-2004), who contributed to this magazine in the 1970s and 1980s (the mag was then known as Stereo Review). A favorite audiophile parody of an equipment report from Stereo Review’s iconic reviewer Julian Hirsch states, “Of all the amplifiers I have reviewed, this was definitely one of them.” Nevertheless, we all enjoyed Rodrigues’ take on our then, as now, crazy business.

But the cartoon here also heralded a problem that has fallen on the high-end audio industry, a problem also shared, though to a lesser degree, by the home theater business: eye-watering prices.

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A/V Veteran
What Size Screen?...How Far Away?
Thomas J. Norton  |  Mar 29, 2009  | 

"How big is the screen?"

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A/V Veteran
What's New!
Thomas J. Norton  |  May 31, 2006  | 

Tomorrow I'm off to our 2006 Home Entertainment Show at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel near Los Angeles International Airport—LAX to the locals. We'll be blogging on line from the show, including gobs of photos and comments about all the new products we see. Check it out, starting tomorrow evening, Thursday, June 1.

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Speaker TechA/V Veteran
When Is a Subwoofer a Subwoofer?
Thomas J. Norton  |  Oct 16, 2018  | 
A recent product announcement from Amazon touted the launch of a “subwoofer” to supplement the response of Amazon’s popular Echo vocal assistant. Presumably it will work with the even smaller Echo Dot as well. But for me it raised a couple of eyebrows.

Given that the low frequency response of an Echo alone probably doesn’t reproduce any useful output much lower than 100 Hz (admittedly an educated guess), the Echo Sub certainly can't hurt. But given its size and its 6-inch driver, there's no way that such a product it can be considered a subwoofer...

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A/V Veteran
Where Have All the Hi-Fi Shops Gone
Thomas J. Norton  |  Feb 25, 2020  | 
When I was a lad I served a turn as a Hi-Fi looker with no bucks to burn…

With apologies to Gilbert & Sullivan, I’d venture that more than a few veteran audiophiles began that way. Back in the day every city of medium to large size had at least one hi-fi shop. Big cities had dozens....I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but by the mid ‘90s there were far fewer shops than before...

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A/V Veteran
Which HDMI Cable Do You REALLY Need?
Thomas J. Norton  |  Oct 25, 2016  | 
HDMI is a boon to videophiles. It can carry both audio and video using one cable, in contrast to the 9 (!) required for a totally analog A/V connection (R, G, B, and 5.1 audio). It can also pass all the features offered by current HD and Ultra HD formats.

HDMI is a nightmare. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it works but limits the information it transports from the source to the display. And sometimes it doesn’t work at all.

Take your pick, but the truth sits somewhere between these two statements.

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A/V Veteran
Why 2012’s ‘Battleship’ Is My Latest Guilty Pleasure
Tom Norton  |  Mar 08, 2017  | 
The glory days of the battleship USS Missouri (the actual ship is shown above) began in World War II, peaking on her deck in Tokyo Bay as the Japanese signed the surrender documents. It’s now a museum piece, but (according to this film, but far from reality) still fueled, armed, and ready to go with a skeleton crew at a moment’s notice.
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A/V Veteran
Why A/B Testing Is Harder Than You Think
Thomas J. Norton  |  Nov 15, 2016  | 
While popular among readers, direct A/B tests comparing one audio or video component with a competing model are far more difficult to do properly than you might imagine. I’ve conducted or participated in numerous such tests over the years, going back to speaker shootouts when I wrote exclusively for Stereophile back in the ‘90s. I also set up or participated in several shootouts of video displays for Home Theater.
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A/V Veteran
Why Are Disney's UHD Blu-ray Soundtracks Falling Short of the Mark?
Thomas J. Norton  |  Mar 12, 2019  | 
Maybe I’m just in a bad mood from having dental surgery yesterday, or maybe there’s something odd happening at Disney these days. But what, exactly, is going on with some of their Ultra HD Blu-ray soundtracks?
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A/V Veteran
Why Don't They...
Thomas J. Norton  |  Jan 25, 2006  | 

Broadcasters are getting serious about HDTV, and for that we're all grateful. But some of them, and their sponsors, still don't get it.

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A/V Veteran
Why I Love Animation (and You Should Too)
Thomas J. Norton  |  Aug 30, 2016  | 
I like to think that have a broad taste in movie and television entertainment. I don’t much care for crime dramas, horror, gross-out comedies, or westerns (having lived through the era where westerns dominated evening television). I like historical films (either epics or straight dramas), science fiction, contemporary drama, and animation.

And there can be little doubt that the latter is on fire and in the midst of a new golden age. The first such era was centered almost exclusively on the early work of Walt Disney. It survived for about 25 years, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) to The Jungle Book (1967). I’d argue, however, that there were only six true classics from that period...

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A/V Veteran
Will Coronavirus Impact the Flow of 2020 TVs?
Thomas J. Norton  |  Mar 10, 2020  | 
Every year as LG gets ready to release new TVs into the market, the company invites reviewers from all over the country to its Los Angeles facility to introduce the new lineup. Just this week I was scheduled to travel to that annual event for an up-close look at LG’s 2020 TV lineup. I thought seriously for days about whether or not to attend as coronavirus (COVID-19) slowly spreads across the country...
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