RHT How To: Whole House Audio How-To: A Homeowner’s Guide to Planning a Whole-House Audio Distribution System By Joe Hageman February 2005 The dream: To own an affordable whole-house audio system that effortlessly pipes music throughout your home, where all the components “talk” harmoniously to one another as if they were one symbiotic unit. Reality: This stuff is expensive, can be down-right tricky to operate and even though we can beam back images from the Red Planet, we can’t seem to figure out how to get audio/video components to talk to one another without a virtual argument ensuing. Welcome to the wonderful world of custom home audio distribution, where the homeowner is a slave to a bunch of temperamental black boxes often run by proprietary software that even the most ardent computer whiz would struggle to figure out.

AV Education on RHT Part II: All About The Making of a DVD-Audio Disc Written by Mark Waldrep, Ph.D. Beyond The Music As I mentioned in the previous installment, the DVD-Audio format is the only high-resolution, multi-channel consumer audio format that can contain media other than audio. That distinction is one of the primary reasons why AIX Records will never release an SACD. I’m a strong advocate of providing consumers with the richest multimedia experience available and have thought so from the outset of the DVD-Video format seven years ago. (Remember when DVD-Videos discs didn’t have any bonus features?) It’s true that the Internet can outperform optical disc media for sheer volume of media, but the quality of both the audio and video do not yet approach that of disc-based media. Just wait until large numbers of consumers get hooked on high-definition video – the gulf between the Internet and disc-based delivery may get even ...

AV Education on RHT Part I: All About The Making of a DVD-Audio Disc Written by Mark Waldrep, Ph.D. Background Readers of online publications like Audio Video Revolution often read reviews and comments regarding new releases on both SACD and DVD-Audio, the new multi-channel, high-resolution audio formats. There’s always the obligatory listing of tracks and a discussion of the sonic quality of each title and a breakdown of the features included on each disc, but rarely do consumers get details on the production procedures and challenges that go into producing a title in these new formats. It might be nice to know the recording process involved (analog vs. digital stages), the number of mixing choices made during a production and the depth of bonus materials that will be included on a disc. Well, as the producer of many DVD-Audio titles for my own audiophile label, AIX Records, and owner of a production facility that services ...

AV Education on RHT Buying a New Home With A Good Sounding Media Room Written by Bob Hodas Introduction A number of years ago, a good friend of mine built a beautiful new house in Napa, California. He had made a bundle working for a professional audio company that had taken the industry by storm with a forward-thinking new product. I went up to visit him and was I ever impressed with his home. It was spectacular in almost every aspect. What wasn’t spectacular were the acoustics of the room in which he set up his favorite speakers. He set the system up in his vast living room, which had an Rt60 (reverb time) that rivaled my old high school gymnasium. I could see for this discerning listener that making his music playback match the grandeur of the overall home was going to take a small miracle.

AV Education on RHT What Is DVD-Audio? Written by Jerry Del Colliano What Is DVD-Audio? DVD-Audio is one of the two competing pre-recorded audio formats positioned to replace the Compact Disc after the CD’s 20-year reign as the ruler of the world’s music stores. DVD-Audio is derived from the same DVD disc that DVD-Video movies are recorded on. However, with DVD-Audio, the space on the disc is configured to optimize high-resolution audio, surround sound and added value features. On most standard DVD-Audio discs, you will find three different audio playback options: 1) A high-resolution stereo track that is often 24 bit and 96 or even 192 kHz resolution. 2) A default DVD-Video compatible surround sound track that is usually a lossy (AKA compressed) surround sound format like DTS (3:1 compression) or Dolby Digital (12:1 compression). 3) A MLP surround sound mix. MLP stands for Meridian Lossless Packing and it is the highest quality audio for surround ...