Sound & Vision February/March 2019

And they asked, “What can you possibly do to follow up the remarkable Triton Reference?” The answer is; Triton One.R! GoldenEar Technology is pleased to announce the introduction of the new Triton One.R. This extraordinary new reference quality loudspeaker is a smaller, less expensive follow up to the Triton Reference. The T Ref has been compared with speakers selling for over ten times its surprisingly a? ordable cost. It has had a remarkable response from both music and hifi enthusiasts as well as press and reviewers from around the world, who have bestowed upon it innumerable Speaker-of-the-Year and Product-of-the-Year awards. Now the T One.R is here for your ultimate delight. S&V’s Al Griffin raved,”…a revelation… If I could pull a Spinal Tap and push the Triton One.R’s Value Rating beyond…

LAST YEAR—oh, around the same time that I’m sitting down to write this—I penned an editorial lamenting changes to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that made it inhospitable to writers covering the high-end audio and home theater categories. The gist of my article was that for us CES had become mostly irrelevant, and that I would sit the 2018 show out and quite possibly future ones as well. Yet here I find myself packing bags for Las Vegas, same as I have nearly every year for the past 25 years. Why? A main reason why I’m attending CES 2019 is to check out new TVs. Manufacturers including Hisense, LG, Samsung, Sony, TCL, and Vizio will all be there as usual showing off new sets, and the highlights are bound to…

Sensible Sound & Vision I would like to comment favorably on the December 2018/January 2019 issue of Sound & Vision. There are many good, sensible reviews of affordable equipment in the issue and I liked reading about the music titles used during listening evaluations. The “Boxes of Joy” feature was also enlightening. I really enjoyed the throwback to the older days of the publication in previous issues and hope that this treat will not stop since some of us have been subscribers for almost 40 years. We lived through hi-fi’s heyday and still hope to see a resurgence of brick-and-mortar stores that sell great equipment. Keep up the good work. Jim Zimnicki Via email Streaming: The Saga Continues One letter-writer in the December 2018/January 2019 issue complained that streaming is a step backward because he…

Apple Music Arrives on Amazon Echo Devices Tech Giants doing battle in the consumer Artificial Intelligence space are notorious for protecting their turf. One example: Siri, the digital assistant built into Apple devices such as the company’s HomePod speaker responds exclusively to music streaming commands for the subscription-only Apple Music service. Want Siri to fetch songs and playlists from Spotify or Tidal? No dice. With such exclusivity being the norm, Apple’s recent announcement that it would allow built-in Apple Music support for Amazon’s Echo family of smart devices came as a surprise move. But is it really that surprising? The $349 HomePod, a Sound & Vision Top Pick award-winner for 2018, is a much pricier option than Amazon’s top speaker, the $149 Echo Plus, a model that already features built-in support for…

Even though 4K TVs have been on the market for less than five years, numerous companies announced that they’ll start selling 8K TVs at CES 2019. This despite the fact that less than half of U.S. homes include a 4K TV, and there’s no 4K programming available yet on U.S. broadcast TV networks. A mite premature? That’s how it must have seemed to consumers 65 years ago when, on December 30, 1953, Admiral and RCA put the first color TVs up for sale. At the time, TV itself was only a few years old, less than half of U.S. homes included a TV, and there was barely any color programming to watch and wouldn’t be for nearly a decade. From its earliest imaginings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, TV…

The first smart speakers were cute little gadgets; no one mistook them for serious audio playback devices. Soon, they started getting bigger and somewhat better, with more attention paid to sound quality. Riva, a company known for multi-room speakers, just introduced the Concert, a compact smart speaker that combines the convenience of voice control with sound that can be taken seriously. Finally, a smart speaker worth listening to. The Concert ($179) isn’t the first smart speaker to make a run at good sound quality—it competes there with the Sonos One and Apple’s HomePod. However, the Concert has features such as highres audio support and Bluetooth streaming that might make it a better option for your needs. Volume, playback, and input select controls are on the speaker’s top, along with a microphone mute…