Sound & Vision February/March 2022

Customer Service And Subscriptions soundandvision@email-customerservice.com Call (800) 666-3746 (international calls: 386-447-6383) or write to: Sound & Vision, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL 32142-0235 Please include your full name, address, and phone number on any inquiries. PREMIUM VOD, Early Access, Theater at Home, In-Theater Rental. Each of these terms essentially describe the same thing: new movies screening in theaters that can also be streamed for home viewing. Premium VOD (we’ll run with that label) is a fairly recent development, one that quickly accelerated with the arrival of Covid. And while theaters have since re-opened, Premium VOD appears to be here to stay in a big way, with many new movies available to stream from services such as Vudu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and more. What’s the catch with Premium VOD? Cost, mainly, with around $20 per…

Sucked Into the Vinyl Vortex I can feel myself getting sucked into the Old Tech Vortex, and Michael Trei is partly to blame. I ignored his first review of Andover Audio’s SpinBase (October/November 2020 issue) because, well, turntables are Old Tech and mine has been in storage for decades. As a certified Old Guy who lived through the turntable’s heyday, I can attest that vinyl is surely the inferior way, used by us only because there was nothing else. My fabulous Denon DP-59L turntable was shelved not long after purchase because, well, compact discs! Now we’re talking! Dynamic range! No pops or cracks! Skipping directly to the track I want to hear! All the songs on one side of the disc! Records are cool these days, sure—but only because they’re Old…

You can tell if a speaker is good the moment it starts playing, so I knew right away the Ai41 was good but didn’t fully appreciate how good until I had lived with it for a couple of weeks. Designed by Fluance, one of the many excellent speaker companies hailing from Canada, and built to spec in China, the Ai41 replaces the outstanding Ai40, one of our Top Value Picks in 2019. It’s a standard two-way bookshelf design featuring a 5-inch woofer and 1-inch silk-dome tweeter in an attractive cabinet just under 11 inches tall—small but not super compact—and available in four woodgrain finishes: black ash or black walnut with a black baffle or a white baffle offset by walnut (shown) or bamboo. There’s no speaker grille. The left speaker is passive…

Many years ago, I would ride my bicycle to the neighborhood record store, lean it against the window (no need to padlock), spend an enjoyable hour flipping through LPs, pick one out, and buy it (cash, of course). I would then slip it into my backpack and ride home, put the needle in the groove, and enjoy the sound of my purchase. Oh, how times have changed. In particular, the cool kids are now buying music as non-fungible tokens (NFT). Strictly speaking, music is a stream of ever-changing fluctuations in pressure that are literally airy. Some pieces of music could even be described as superlunary. Nevertheless, we have found ways to brutally commercialize it. For well over a hundred years, companies have churned out packaged music on a wide variety of…

Whenever people say I have my head in the clouds, I often take it as a compliment—even if they don’t mean it that way. (I can usually tell they don’t, especially if there’s an expletive modifying the word “head” and/or “clouds.”) Chances are, you have your own “head in the clouds” moments as well—probably after having donned your favorite pair of headphones to envelop yourself in the musical silo of your choice at the highest of hi-res levels possible. Fact is, headphone listening often gives us that singular sense of being enmeshed in a sonic cocoon of our own making that is equal parts comfort and joy. Over the years, more than a few attempts have been made at what I’ll refer to as 3D audio for the mind, or music…

When I started out as a custom installer back in 1998, a “big screen” was a 60-inch rear-projection TV, with high-end models available from the likes of Mitsubishi and Pioneer Elite. These were 4:3 aspect ratio, cathode ray tube-driven sets with 480i resolution, and they were physically hulking beasts weighing upwards of hundreds of pounds. In fact, our company purchased special industrial suction cups to use when delivering the Pioneer models that allowed four of us to safely move it. And an installation often required doing a site survey before delivering the TV to make sure we had the logistics of getting it into the room figured out. If you wanted a more cinematic image larger than 60-inches, the decision then was simple: go with a projector. And it wasn’t uncommon…