Sound & Vision April 2018

In preparation for our April issue, and in search of a subject for our retrospective flashback feature, I pressed deep into our 60-year archive for hints of the origin of Lirpa Labs and its mysterious, opinionated, and wildly creative founder, Loof Lirpa. Many readers know that Loof and his often wacky products typically only appear in the weeks leading up to April, more often than not as we’re just going to press. I perused every April issue looking for a glimpse of him—every single one, dating back to our first year in 1958 when our predecessor HiFi & Music Review was in only its third edition. Despite my recollections of Lirpa from my time at Stereo Review in the mid-1990s, and those of my colleague (and former editor-in-chief) Bob Ankosko,…

E-mail them to HTLetters@sorc.com. Please note: Questions about the features and functions of a particular product are best directed to the manufacturer. Questions about what product you should buy are best directed to a dealer who knows all the details of your system, your preferences, and your personal habits. All submissions are considered the exclusive property of Sound & Vision magazine and TEN: The Enthusiast Network. We reserve the right to edit letters for brevity. Due to the volume of mail that we receive, we regret that we cannot respond to every letter. Our Founding Fathers Rob Sabin’s Track One column in the January issue excerpts comments on Woodstock by former editor William Anderson. I actually remember reading those remarks in 1969. They’re even more laughably condescending and out of touch today…

THE ULTRA HD Alliance is on a mission to spread the good word of Ultra HD, which, as any self-respecting home theater enthusiast will tell you, is more than just a resolution story. Yes, having four times as many pixels as standard HD is a definite boon to image quality, but high dynamic range (HDR), wide color gamut, and other recent advances in TV picture quality are even more compelling, nudging us ever closer to images that mirror the real world. Last summer the Alliance recruited industry veteran Mike Fidler as its first full-time president. We recently caught up with Fidler, who has served in key executive roles at Sony and Pioneer, to get an update on the Alliance and its efforts to promote the benefits of what it calls a…

TiVo’s Vox branding identifies voice control in its Bolt DVR and Mini client. “Show me movies with Scarlett Johansson.” See our review on page 64... Samsung-Owned Harman has joined WiSA, the Wireless Speaker and Audio Association. That suggests that WiSA-compliant wireless speakers from Harman brands may be on the way... Toshiba Sold Its TV business to China’s Hisense. The $113 million deal includes production, R&D, and a 40-year brand license... AudioControl Added Dolby Vision passthrough to its products. That includes the Concert AVR-7 and AVR-9 receivers and Maestro M5 and M9 pre/pros... Denon and Marantz AVRs have been updated with DTS Virtual:X. This provides simulated surround effects from encoded or legacy sources. See our review of the Denon AVR-X3400H on page 36... Sony’s 2017 Android TVs now have Google Assistant. The mic is built into the remote control... Funai-Made Philips TVs are the…

PRICE $249 FOCAL IS BEST KNOWN AS France’s leading speaker manufacturer, but in 2016 they turned a corner and entered the fiercely competitive high-end headphone market with two extraordinary ’phones, the Elear, which I reviewed for Sound & Vision (January 2017), and the deliriously great Utopia (Sound & Vision, July/August 2017). This time I wanted to try Focal’s most affordable full-size headphones, the Listen, and I came away mightily impressed. They share no parts with Focal’s original, affordable Spirit headphone line—the Listen’s earcups, 40mm mylar/titanium drivers, and headband are all new. Weighing just 9.6 ounces, the Listen is one of the lightest sets of over-the-ear headphones I’ve tested in a long while. The 4.6-foot-long, user-replaceable cable has a single-button remote and a separate mic closer to your face on the cable. The cable…

You just bought a Tesla. Congratulations! You, my friend, are driving the wave of the future. While everyone else is burning dinosaur droppings, you are propelled ever onward by the magical energy of the sun and the wind. Gaia, the primal Mother Earth Goddess, loves you. On the other hand, and I feel bad telling you this, you are also a murderer. One of my fondest childhood memories is carefully adjusting my radio’s spindly antenna and pulling in KMOX to listen to St. Louis Cardinal baseball. Now you want to kill that. Thanks a lot. Your car is sleek. It’s powered by renewable energy. It drives itself down the road. The government gave you money to help you buy it. It accelerates like nobody’s business. It’s a Tesla, for heaven’s sake. And…