Steve Guttenberg

The S&V Interview
Grammy Award-Winning Producer Don Was
Steve Guttenberg  |  May 30, 2013
Grammy Award-winning producer Don Was has had a long and storied career producing records for some of rock ’n’ roll’s most famous acts from the early 1980s to the present. Today, he also holds the title of president of the respected jazz record label Blue Note Records. Home Theater’s Steve Guttenberg recently sat down with Was to get his take on the role of a record producer and what it was like to work with so many great artists.
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Headphone Reviews
Sol Republic Master Tracks Headphones
Steve Guttenberg  |  May 17, 2013
Performance
Features
Ergonomics
Value
Price: $200 At a Glance: Excellent isolation from the world outside • Bass so solid, you won’t miss your subwoofer • Modular construction

I’ve reviewed more than a hundred headphones, but the Sol Republic Master Tracks is the first to require some “assembly.” No worries; Slip the headband through the ear cups’ slots, plug in the cable, and you’re done. The whole operation takes about a minute.

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Headphone Reviews
Audio-Technica ATH-M50 Professional Studio Monitor Headphones
Steve Guttenberg  |  Apr 17, 2013

Performance
Features
Ergonomics
Value
Price: $199 At a Glance: Basic styling with solid build quality • Supremely comfortable to wear • Sounds swell with tablets and receivers

Universally loved audio products are rare, but you won’t find too many folks with a bad thing to say about the Audio-Technica ATH-M50 headphones (it has around 800 five-star and just nine one-star ratings on Amazon). The headphone consistently garners raves, but the mundane styling won’t cut it with folks craving the latest fashion statements from the likes of Beats by Dr. Dre, V-Moda, or Bowers & Wilkins. While the ATH-M50 is mostly made of plastic, it feels remarkably durable, and its two-year warranty offers double the length of coverage of most headphones, even higher-end models.

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Vintage Gear
TV for the Ages: The Philco Predicta
Steve Guttenberg  |  Apr 11, 2013
Tube televisions are starting to look like relics of a bygone era, but they had a long run, from the very beginning of the TV age until just a few years ago. CRTs evolved from round, to rounded squares, to squarish, almost flat tubes—but cathode ray tube TVs (and projectors) remained the unchallenged display technology right through to the dawn of hi-def TV.
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Vintage Gear
The Grado Phono Cartridge: A Classic Lives On
Steve Guttenberg  |  Mar 26, 2013  |  Published: Mar 20, 2013
In the days before the CD arrived in 1982, LPs were the format of choice for music lovers. While the turntable played a significant role in determining sound quality, you also needed a great phono cartridge to get the music out of the grooves.
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Vintage Gear
JVC HR-D725 VHS H-Fi VCR
Steve Guttenberg  |  Mar 14, 2013
Life before the first VCRs arrived in the late 1970s was pretty boring. TV watching was limited to whatever meager offerings were available at that moment from broadcast and cable TV stations. VCRs and time shifting changed all that.
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Vintage Gear
Magnepan Tympani Speaker
Steve Guttenberg  |  Feb 27, 2013
Jim Winey didn’t set out to design a new type of speaker, just a better electrostatic speaker. He worked evenings, weekends, vacations, whenever he could starting in 1966, while he was still working for 3M as an engineer. His experiments with flexible bar magnets and Mylar led Winey to invent and patent the planar magnetic speaker.
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Vintage Gear
Pioneer Kuro Plasma HDTV
Steve Guttenberg  |  Feb 14, 2013
The Pioneer Kuro plasma display broke new ground upon its introduction in 2007 and was quickly hailed by critics and buyers as The Greatest Television Ever Made. Incredibly, as many Home Theater readers know, the Kuro line that debuted in 2007 was phased out by 2010—which proves that just because you make the best, doesn’t mean people will buy it.
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Vintage Gear
Pioneer VP-1000 LaserDisc Player
Steve Guttenberg  |  Jan 31, 2013
Magnavox brought the first Laserdisc player, the VH-8000, to market in late 1978, but Pioneer was the company that put the format on the map. Its first player, the VP-1000, debuted in the U.S. in 1980, and later in Japan. I doubt Pioneer ever thought Laserdisc would threaten VHS and Betamax’s dominance in the mass market; Laserdisc was targeted to high-end buyers.
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Vintage Gear
Krell KSA 100 Stereo Amplifier
Steve Guttenberg  |  Jan 15, 2013
Dan D'Agostino is a driven man, his all-consuming passions for sound, technology, and music made his first company, Krell Industries, the Ferrari of the high-end audio world in the 1980s. Dan plucked the Krell name from the classic sci-fi flick, "Forbidden Planet," and I'm guessing it was Dr. Morbius' line, "In times long past this planet was the home of a mighty and noble race of beings, which called themselves the Krell." that sparked D'Agostino's imagination. Dan and his wife Rondi launched the company with just one product, the KSA 100 amplifier, at the 1981 Consumer Electronics Show. In the early days the D'Agostinos worked hand to mouth, they'd build a few amps, put them in their car, drive them to a dealer, get a check, then build two more and so on.

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