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Darryl Wilkinson | Oct 08, 2012 |

We lost a pioneer of the modern loudspeaker industry with the passing of William (Bill) Hecht earlier this year on September 12th at age 89. I was only five years old (and I imagine many of you reading this weren’t even born yet) in 1967 when Bill Hecht patented his signature contribution to the audio world, the soft-dome tweeter, arguably the most widely used speaker driver worldwide for the last 30 years. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Hecht once during my career. In this age of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the endless onslaught of 24/7 self-promotion, Bill Hecht was a quiet, self-effacing man who seemed most comfortable behind the scenes. Indeed, throughout his career, Hecht and his company, United Speaker Systems, was known for making the speakers that made other speaker companies famous.

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The Flex House: A Smart Way To Do A Smart Home

Darryl Wilkinson | Feb 13, 2018 |

Too often smart home technology is more "because we can" than it is "because we should." The Flex House at CES 2018 proved that you can integrate smart home technology that's highly functional rather than mostly hype.

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The FTC Says If You Break It, You Should Be Able to Fix It

Darryl Wilkinson | Apr 23, 2018 |

By now, even the most ecologically minded person has probably had their fill of Earth Day articles and blog posts. Bear with me, though, because this post is only tangentially related to Earth Day and eco-sensibilities. Instead, it's more about getting your hands dirty with the innards of an electronic gadget or component after you've removed or cut the "WARRANTY VOID IF SEAL BROKEN OR REMOVED" sticker on the device's outer casing. I've done it plenty of times before...

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The Next Smartest Thing

Darryl Wilkinson | Mar 25, 2014 |

Even the best smart homes today aren’t much more than a cool collection of dumb gadgets managed by a controller with a good memory. Few, if any, of them aren’t intelligent enough yet to figure out when to do tasks on their own. Programming what actions should happen when and under what varying conditions or triggers is a large part of why home automation has been confined to the posh multi-thousand square foot homes of the rich and powerful or the often not-so-posh and much smaller homes of the electronic tinkerers and makers. (Of course, the cost of controllers, sensors, devices, and installation doesn’t help put home automation in the “mass market” category yet, either.)

Despite its relatively high price ($250 - or $3.2 billion, if you’re Google), the Nest thermostat is very popular (I saw one on the wall in a local Subway restaurant a couple of days ago) because - in addition to its Applish-elegance design - it “programs itself so you don’t have to.” Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it turns out that there are a lot of people out there who absolutely hate programming a thermostat; and hate it enough, apparently, that they’re willing to spend four-to-five times more $ on a “learning thermostat” than they would on an average 5-2 day programmable thermostat. So any smart home automation company looking to break into the big time needs to take note of this fact. Does anyone really believe that these same folks want to spend the time and effort to program an entire home of automated gadgets? “It programs itself so you don’t have to” needs to be the smart home mantra.

Recently a couple of smart home systems caught my attention because of their learning capabilities...

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The Smart Home: Your Hub or Mine?

Darryl Wilkinson | Apr 22, 2015 |

On April 18th, Quirky Wink HUB owners got an up-close and a little too personal look at the perils of putting control of your smart home into even the most well-intentioned hands over the internet. According to Wink:

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The VoicePod: You Speak. It Obeys.

Darryl Wilkinson | Jun 11, 2013 |

CEDIA 2012 has receded into the poorly lit reaches of my cobweb-covered memory. But the one thing that most stood out in the cornucopia of all things custom-install still stands in sharp relief today: HouseLogix’s absolutely amazing VoicePod. Actually, it sits in sharp relief – right on the top of my desk thanks to HouseLogix’s CEO and Founder, Ted Rosenberger, who shipped a beta version of the VoicePod for me to play for the last few months.

So what exactly is a “VoicePod”?

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TVs and Soundbars: What a Bracket

Darryl Wilkinson | Jul 22, 2013 |

I’ve been sampling a variety of soundbars lately, ranging in price from $300 to $3,900. Despite the generic term – “soundbar” or “surround bar” – it’s actually a very diverse and interesting category with all sorts of subcategories within the soundbar umbrella: active, passive, LCR-only, LCR plus discrete rears, and etc. It’s also a category that can arouse understandably strong emotions of disgust and disdain among purists and quite a few custom installers. For millions of people, however, simplicity usually trumps sound quality; and the soundbar tsunami continues to swell and is unlikely to crest anytime soon.

But the pencil-thin form factor of flat-panel TVs is at odds with the acoustic principles speaker engineers currently take advantage of. The result is a shotgun marriage of something that is skinny with a partner that is usually a bit bigger-boned. Both of the home-theater spouses, though, do share a common aspect. Each one performs best when viewed/listened to from a position directly in front of the it. And therein lies a problem: what do you do with the soundbar if you turn the flat-panel on its base or otherwise change the angle of the TV (if it’s mounted on a tilting, pivoting, or full-motion wall mount from, for example, companies such as OmniMount, Triple Play designs from Bell’O, or Sanus)? In a more extreme case, what’s to be done with the soundbar if the TV is mounted in a corner?

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Upcoming Universal Remote Uses — Spoiler Alert — a Touchscreen

Darryl Wilkinson | Feb 18, 2015 |

I can’t claim that I haven’t been guilty of the same practice in the past, but sometimes I get very, very tired of reading article after article in the tech press about the latest thingamabob that promises to revolutionize the way we do something—even to the point of changing our lives forever. Of course, as journalists and writers, we need readers; and, unfortunately in most cases, sensationalism gets the eyeballs we crave. Kickstarter and Indiegogo have been a boon for us. We get to report on lots of crazy ideas that’ll never make it to market but sound awesome. “New HDMI cable promises to cure cancer and is Dolby Atmos-ready!”

So I’m a bit jaded. As a result, it’s probably unfair to a company whose people have worked very diligently to come up with a new slant on a device category that’s been problematic from the early days of the consumer electronics industry, but I’m a bit underwhelmed by

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Weatherproof TV: SunBriteTV's SB-4670HD Shines Again

Darryl Wilkinson | Jul 20, 2015 |

Over the years, I’ve written a lot about outdoor audio and video. Today, most of the people I talk with know about outdoor speakers, especially the portable Bluetooth type—although it’s generally the small, water-resistant models that they think of. (They’d be so much better off with the Soundcast Melody. It’s $399, but I have yet to find a portable, outdoor speaker with Bluetooth that sounds and looks anywhere near as good. Two years after it was introduced, it’s still the best of the portable outdoor bunch.) A smaller number of people know about outdoor speakers that can be permanently installed under the eaves of your home, on a back patio, or around a pool. Some have even heard about outdoor speakers that look like flower pots, rocks, landscape lights, or, sometimes, lifesize dogs, slightly larger-than-life-size frogs, and even angry Tiki heads. But when I mention outdoor, weatherproof TVs—if they’re still talking to me—people either blankly look at me like I’ve just said something in broken Klingon or they say, “Really? They make those? That’s cool.”

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What’s a High-End Home Theater Doing in America’s Best Airport*?

Darryl Wilkinson | Oct 23, 2017 |

You wouldn’t expect to see a high-end, 17-seat “microcinema” in the middle of an airport, but that’s exactly what I found at Oregon’s Portland International Airport (PDX) after I’d landed there in late July of this year. After being in the air for hours, scurrying through DFW to make a connection in a different terminal, and then spending more hours in the air, I was in no mood to explore anything other than the baggage claim carousel once I finally shuffled off the plane. So, despite glancing at the 30-feet wide, neon-emblazoned Hollywood Theatre marquee as the moving walkway carried me passed it, I remained blissfully ignorant as to the who, what, why, and how of the whole thing. (Even in my air travel-induced stupor, I was able to deduce the “where” part…)

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When Low-Tech Is Better than Know-Tech

Darryl Wilkinson | May 20, 2014 |

When you're as interested in AV and home entertainment as the writers and readers of S&V are, it's easy to fall into the trap of taking things—especially yourself—a little too seriously. Of course, chasing perfection is a laudable endeavor, but it's not always so when that pursuit comes at the expense of the basic fun and enjoyment the gear and technology are supposed to bring into our lives. I know that this might sound like heresy, but sometimes a low-tech solution can work just as well a more "advanced" one…

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Where Are All Those Old TVs Going?

Darryl Wilkinson | Nov 20, 2017 |

Televisions are one of the most popular items to purchase during the myriad Black Friday sales extravaganza that’s already begun—even though it isn’t Friday, yet. Last year, for example, Target sold 3,200 televisions per minute in first hour of opening on Thanksgiving. With prices coming down on 4K UHD TVs with HDR, you can bet that TVs will be as big—if not a bigger—a sales success.

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Your Brain as the Ultimate Universal Remote Control?

Darryl Wilkinson | Feb 11, 2013 |

It’s not quite the stuff of a Philip K. Dick novel, but Freer Logic’s BodyWave technology promises to bring mind control to the masses.

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