Scott Wilkinson

These days, earbuds are as important as speakers for delivering music to consumers, but most are woefully lacking in the sound-quality department. Japan's Final Audio Design intends to correct this shortcoming with its Piano Forte X-VIII series.

Are 21:9 TVs worth waiting for? What small speakers do you recommend for whole-house audio? Are the JVC 3D projectors as good with 2D material as their predecessors?

As far as I have understood up to now, a passive-3D LCD flat panel displays 3D Blu-ray images in the following manner—the odd-numbered lines of left-eye information are displayed in the odd-numbered lines on the screen, and the even-numbered lines of right-eye information are displayed in the screen's even-numbered lines. As a result, the TV simply discards the undisplayed lines and each eye sees a resolution of only 1920x540 pixels. However, the image on such TVs that I've seen looks sharper than this would seem to indicate, though I do normally see thin, black horizontal lines, especially if I'm too close to the screen. The explanation I've heard most often is that the brain fuses the two images into one 1920x1080 3D image, but LG tells a somewhat different story.

A couple of months ago, Steve Guttenberg wrote a short review of the Isabellina HPA LFP-V Edition headphone amp from Red Wine Audio in his Audiophiliac blog, implying that it could be the world's best. With the recent launch of InnerFidelity, our new sibling site devoted to headphones and other personal-audio products, I thought it especially fitting to profile this little gem here.