Premiere Design

I don't typically cover so-called multimedia speakers in this blog, but when I came across an ad for the GLA-55 from <A href="http://www.harmankardon.com">Harman Kardon</A> in an upscale magazine, I was intrigued. The cabinet looks like it was chiseled from rock crystal, and its beauty turns out to extend well below the surface.

Data compression is probably the single most important factor in the meteoric success of digital audio, especially when it comes to online downloads and portable players like the iPod. Lossy compression formats such as MP3 discard as much as 90 percent of the original data&#151;hence the term "lossy"&#151;so that music tracks can be quickly downloaded. In addition, such files require very little memory, allowing thousands of songs to be stored in a device no bigger than a matchbook.

Eleven years ago, in the fall of 2000, the Sunday Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times published a long freelance article I wrote announcing the birth of digital cinema. Digital projection for large venues was mostly a dream at the time, but the technology existed and had been proven to provide satisfying images for the average moviegoer. Meanwhile, digital cinema’s biggest booster, filmmaker George Lucas, had just finished shooting Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones in 1080p/24-frame-per-second digital using a cutting-edge camera developed by Sony and Panavision. It was the first major motion picture to be shot entirely in video.

And now for something completely different—a turntable shaped like a piano with a tonearm made from a violin bow. Italian maker Horo calls the WJE168—named in honor of jazz legend William J. (Bill) Evans—a "tunable turntable."

Online distribution of video content—especially high-def video—will never float my boat until the bandwidth available to most homes is way faster than it is today. According to Speedtest.net, in 2010, South Korea had the fastest average household bandwidth at 22.46 megabits per second, while the US was 30th in the world at 7.78Mbps—that's less than Latvia (18.02Mbps), Lithuania (15.81Mbps), and Liechtenstein (7.79Mbps). But even in Korea, streaming high-def—not to mention anything with even higher resolution, like 4K or UltraHD—requires some serious compression, which lowers the picture quality dramatically.

An incredible solution to this problem was quietly demonstrated in a hotel suite at CES this year by a company called R²D² ("Twice the Research, Twice the Development!"). The company's Hypernet technology bypasses the Internet completely, offering nearly unlimited bandwidth and instantaneous transmissions using the principles of quantum physics. Inventor Leia Organic Skydancer, love child of two spaced-out hippies, is a video artist and musician as well as a physicist and computer scientist who created Hypernet so she could effectively market her own material, including her first project, Music From the Hearts of Hyperspace.

Bang & Olufsen BeoLab 18 Wireless Speaker System

About that headline...It’s inspired by the sheepish “Immaculate Wireless Sound” moniker Bang & Olufsen uses for the wireless system integrated into the stunning BeoLab 18 tower speaker. Actually, the phrase is code for WiSA, the standard that makes it possible to for speakers to receive uncompressed 24-bit/96 kHz audio over the air from B&O’s stand-alone transmitter or one built into the BeoVision 11 TV. We asked Senior Vice President of Product Creation Lou Schreurs to tell us about this impressive speaker.

S&V: How did the BeoLab 18 come into being? What led to the desire to “go wireless?”
Lou Schreurs: We felt the need to rejuvenate our iconic BeoLab 8000 from a design perspective and, at the same time, wanted to bring the speaker into the 21st Century by making it wireless and digital, using our proprietary Digital Signal Processing (DSP) capabilities. The integration of a high-quality wireless system was driven by the desire for convenience without sacrificing audio quality. In some of our customers’ homes, it was not easy to run cables in a neat way, particularly rear speakers, limiting their ability to experience true surround sound...