Sound & Vision

On The Web Log on to soundandvision.com and sign up for our free monthly enewsletter. You’ll get exclusive tips, news, trends, and reviews from your favorite S&V writers. Top Pick Gear of the Year HI ALL, I hope 2023 is treating you well. It is a year of fresh possibilities with many exciting new AV technologies. But the new year is also a time to reflect. In this issue, we look at the best Top Picks over the past year, including a few that we snuck into this issue, like the Marantz Cinema 50 AVR and Epson LS800 UST projector. Spoiler alert: The overall winner is Samsung’s S95B quantum-dot OLED, which delivers the best-looking picture Tom Norton has seen from a TV! CES 2023 CONCLUDES Technology never sleeps. If anything, it stays up late…

Back to the Future Sound & Vision 20 years ago, the “Pre-dawn to new millennium!” Every year I archive the preceding year of Sound & Vision issues, and at times I browse through old ones. This year, I revisited the January 2000 Collector’s Issue of Sound & Vision. Editor in Chief Bob Ankosko, under On Track, writes, “Welcome to the Future!” The most interesting thing in this issue was the special insert, a guided tour to “Home of Tomorrow is Here.” Michel Gaughn, Al Griffin, and Ken Pohlmann made their predictions, too in “A Window Into the New Millennium for Home Entertainment.” Under “Futurespeak,” there were interviews with corporate people from Sony, Panasonic, Philips Electronics, Intel, and RCA. It is amazing how in the last 20 years, the forecasted technology for computers, home…

Samsung’s over-the-top 98-inch Neo QLED showcases what’s possible when a TV has the horsepower needed to handle HDR properly. What’s mind-blowing is that in HDR mode, its measured brightness can exceed 1000 nits, full-screen. Few TVs of any size can achieve this level of brightness, and the QN100B does it while preserving extremely high contrast and offering a wide color gamut. The resulting picture quality is thought-provoking, even at this price point, because it begs the question of what to prioritize for the ultimate home viewing experience: Size or HDR capability. Projectors are great for size; a projector is the only economical option if you want to go beyond 100 inches. But TVs are the way to go for vivid HDR because most 4K content for home viewing is mastered in…

Mr. McLuhan was a communication theorist. His famous aphorism was the title of the first chapter of his book, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, published in 1964. It perfectly expresses the notion that, in many ways, the communication medium is more important than the messages it conveys. The beauty of the declaration is that it might seem askew at first, but the more you think about it, the more plumb it seems. In the world of audio/video, the medium is monumentally important. From a purely informational standpoint, all that gear in your home theater room is simply a communications medium. Also, clearly, the better the medium, the more information it can convey. For example, an FM broadcast conveys more information than an AM broadcast. A color TV conveys more information…

Tom Petty always, always knew how to ensure the music he made over the course of his long and storied career would sound the absolute best it could during playback in any format. Petty’s longtime engineer and production partner Ryan Ulyate continues to carry that torch — and up the ante, as evidenced by his stellar mixing of all 18 tracks found on Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers’ November 1993 Greatest Hits collection in Dolby Atmos (available on Apple Music Unlimited, Amazon Music, and Tidal). Recently, Ulyate and I got on Zoom together to discuss how he created the stems for these Atmos mixes by accessing the original masters, which songs on Greatest Hits are the most immersive and why, and what Tom Petty himself would have said upon hearing his…

After encountering the same issues repeatedly when working with customers at my CI firm, I thought a series of columns on working with an installer might help. While this is written through the lens of working on A/V projects, many tips are applicable when hiring any trade to work in your home. And I can guarantee that following these suggestions will make the project—and your relationship with the installation team—go smoother for everyone. The client/installer relationship has different aspects depending on the project’s phase. In part one of this series, I covered things you should plan on leading up to the day of installation. This included being there, emailing pictures of the work area, understanding the scope of work, confirming that any gear you are providing is available, working, and has…