Founded in 1998 and quickly making a name for themselves in the subwoofer market, SVS is now a global maker and distributor of complete speaker systems. They are a unique organization, with a design ...
Italian speaker maker Opera has been making headlines recently with their great-sounding demos at various audio shows, earning them positive print and online reviews. I reviewed their floor-standing Seconda model, which I found ...
Active speakers have had a tough road in the audiophile world. They are fairly commonplace in recording studios and other pro sound environments. I have heard several theories for this, including the fact ...
Rein Audio impressed me when I had the opportunity to review their very fine sounding X-DAC last year. The German based company, just a few years old, has since developed a few more ...
The very aptly named HiFiMan has been around since 2007, and I first became aware of the company from the ads for their high performance portable file players. They have developed into a one-stop ...
With the move to computer and hard drive based digital sources, one would think a format tied to a physical medium would be odd in 2013. But SACD has proved to be remarkably resilient ...
I’ve enjoyed reviewing several Rogue products over the last few years. The Brodheadsville, PA based company makes beautifully built, excellent sounding tube preamps, power amps, and integrated amps. They have products ...
Audience, out of San Marcos, CA, is one of the most respected companies in the power conditioning arena, with their line of adeptReponse series consistently getting rave reviews from the audio press and ...
PS Audio, out of Boulder, CO, has been a major player in high end audio for decades. Their power distribution/conditioning units and digital source components have been go to products for droves ...
MartinLogan enjoys a place at the mantle occupied by a relatively small group of state of the art speaker companies enduring the test of time. Nearing its third decade, the Lawrence, Kansas company ...
Boston Acoustics was founded in 1979 and quickly made a name among budget audiophiles, and later home theater enthusiasts. They became a big player in car audio as well. In 2005, D&M Holdings ...
Sometimes good things appear in big packages. So it was when Federal Express arrived at my door with two huge boxes that happen to house one Opera Seconda loudspeaker each. Opera manufactures its ...
It's a 24 inch 3D television and you may be asking yourself "what's to get excited about?" It's a nice looking set of course, and includes LED edge lighting, a 240Hz refresh rate and active shutter 3D. The really cool part isn't the TV though - it's the technology baked into the TV. The PlayStation 3D display is the first set that offers SimulView. It's a use of 3D technology that's aimed directly at gamers. What SimulView does is allow two people to watch completely different things on the same TV. Instead of playing split-screen which limits your vision and gives your friend an edge up in the competition if he's looking at your screen, you both get a 2D full-screen experience.
It's becoming more common for projectors, receivers and other devices to support 4K2K technology, but before you go bumping up to the next big thing, you may want to check out the next bigger thing - UHDTV. Ultra high-definition television is absolutely ridiculous. You're getting a resolution of 7680 × 4320, which equates to over 33 million pixels on the screen at once. If that doesn't shame your 1080p set, nothing will.
The folks at Atlantic Technology are pretty intense about quality. They're going to be creating a good chunk of new products utilizing their H-PAS bass technology and they'd like to bring to market quickly. Other companies may outsource to a third party manufacturer, but not Atlantic. "We've recognized a need to expand the scale of our activities without diluting our brand along those paths chosen by some of our competitors," says Atlantic president Peter Tribesman. He says that quite a few products using H-PAS are planned and they'll be bringing those to stores soon. "What we will not do," he adds, "is to put our logo on dime-a-dozen contractor speakers or disappoint our loyal dealer base."
The folks at Atlantic Technology are pretty intense about quality. They're going to be creating a good chunk of new products utilizing their H-PAS bass technology and they'd like to bring to market quickly. Other companies may outsource to a third party manufacturer, but not Atlantic. "We've recognized a need to expand the scale of our activities without diluting our brand along those paths chosen by some of our competitors," says Atlantic president Peter Tribesman. He says that quite a few products using H-PAS are planned and they'll be bringing those to stores soon. "What we will not do," he adds, "is to put our logo on dime-a-dozen contractor speakers or disappoint our loyal dealer base."
It's easy to rag on streaming video. The video quality from sources like Hulu and Netflix is pretty disappointing and if you're looking for more than stereo sound you'll be sorely disappointed. Vudu is different though. From the onset, the company has been aimed at providing high quality streaming to its customer base and today they've taken it a step further. For the first time ever, 7.1 channel audio will be available via a streaming video service.
As A/V and home cinema enthusiasts, I'm sure many of you have spent countless hours reading about audio and video products, and home theatre upgrades. We've drooled over installations and do it yourself projects featured in magazines and Internet forums while planning our dream cinemas. But asside from that one scene in MTV's Cribs where the star of the week bragged about thier in-house theatres, there haven't been many television shows where you can see the before and after progress of a home cinema / man cave upgrades...until now.
For those of us with really nice home theater setups, the thought of getting a movie at home while it's still in theaters is an incredible one. At the price of $60 it makes economic sense if you have a few people over and you take into account the 500% markup on popcorn prices. Universal was planning to make the Eddie Murphy movie 'Tower Heist' available just 21 days after it hit theaters but theater owners fought against it with gusto.