Sound & Vision April 2017

A new kind of CES...bad craziness in the desert. I was somewhere around Barstow, heading west with the stench of the waning 2017 CES already miles behind me, when suddenly I realized it’s been years since I’d read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—Hunter S. Thompson’s seminal memorial to the ’60s drug culture and lost era of hope. This CES had been a particularly rousing cattle run through the bowels of tech; a world of hovering drones, self-driving cars, and fastmoving women cashing in on the show’s heavy rollers at the hotel cocktail lounges, just to name a few. There were some things for A/V buffs to look at, the most exciting of it the new TVs, which just seem to keep getting better—you can read all our show coverage on…

E-mail them toHTLetters@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. Read with interest Rob Sabin’s comments responding to Ken Truesdale’s e-mail in the January 2017 issue (“You Forgot FM”). Rob stated, in part, “Forgive me for forgetting once again to mention a now outdated and increasingly meaningless technology (both AM…

15 Minutes with Dirac Founder Mathias Johansson Mathias Johansson, CEO and co-founder of Sweden’s Dirac Research, has devoted his professional life to developing technologies that improve sound quality—whether that sound is music heard over headphones or car speakers, or an intricate Dolby Atmos soundtrack played over a high-end home theater system. “Our passion is to invent new sound technologies that offer a better sound experience regardless of the sound system,” he says. “We want to be a quality seal for good sound, and we want to achieve this through scientific methods.” If the accolades the Dirac Live room-correction system has garnered among enthusiasts is any measure, Johansson is not only on the right path to elevating sound quality but making tangible progress.—Bob Ankosko S&V: Tell us a little about your background and…

Dish Network’s NBA Team Pass lets you follow your favorite team for $119 per season. The NBA League Pass, which covers the whole league, is still available for $199... Sports Account for 84.3 percent of all DVR recordings, according to a Thuuz Sports and Ring Digital survey of 1,000 pay-TV subscribers. The majority use the DVR as a backup when they can’t watch a game or missed the beginning of a game, while another 58 percent use it to skip ads... YouTube Red now has 1.5 million paying subscribers in addition to the one-billion users of its free version. The $9.99/ month service, launched last October, lets you stream music and music videos without ads, offers original movie content, allows for offline viewing, lets you listen with the screen off, and includes…

PRICE $899 UNLIKE NEARLY EVERY OTHER speaker company that jumped into the headphone market with a complete line, Bowers & Wilkins has released just one (or two) headphones at a time. The P5 on-ear was first out of the gate in 2010; then the C5 in-ear and P3 on-ear; the Series 2 versions of those headphones followed; next came the over-the-ear P7; more recently the wireless P5 and P7; and now the all-new flagship P9 Signature. Thanks to the slow and steady approach, the sound for all of B&W’s headphones has been consistently chocolatey-rich. The P9 Signature is similar, but the sound is more evolved. Before I started on this review, I assumed the P9 Signature would share some tech with the overthe- ear P7, but the P9 is an all-new, more upscale…

Those who appreciate the anomalies created by humans transitioning from a physical to a digital world find comfort in small things—like rotary interfaces on phone screens that take 10 times as long to dial a number. Or the ability to “rip” 78 rpm records on a USB-enabled turntable with only two speeds by playing a 78 at 45 revolutions per minute—taking nearly twice as long for the record to complete while sounding like a drunk with slurred speech, this being the only way for the hardware to lift the signal from the groove and let software in a connected computer give the music its groove back. For some users, putting an old face on something new fosters reassurance. How else can you explain the crop of musicplaying apps that come straight…