All Blog Posts (293)

Ray Harryhausen dies at age 92. If you are not familiar with his stop-motion technique in cinema, well, shame on you! My childhood imagination was greatly influenced by him...as well as some of my childhood nightmares!

What's your favorite film that featured Ray's…

Sony will be releasing a series of “Mastered in 4K” Blu-rays this month. These are actually 2K discs that are compatible with any standard Blu-ray player and HDTV, but the 4K master (even when downconverted to 2K), is said to offer a superior picture to what you’ll get from sources mastered in 2K. Sony’s new UHD…

Tucked away in a non-descript office park near the airport in Portland, OR is Triad Speakers.  Looking at the outside of the building you would never imagine that inside the building is a complete speaker design and manufacturing company.  Once you do enter you find a company where every speaker is made to order and can be customized to whatever the user needs.  After they announced their new Cinema Reference LCR2 and Surround 2 speakers at CEDIA in 2012 I wanted to see how they produced…

For a limited time only, THX LTD. is offering a free app for your iOS device that looks (and sounds) like fun. For you Geeks out there that are too cheap frugal to get your HDTV professionally calibrated, this might be just what you have been waiting for...but hurry! After the Superbowl it'll cost $1.99 at the App Store-

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Known as the “Father of the Talkies”, The Jazz Singer was the first film to match sound and picture. By 1927, some short subjects had already been "talkies," and even a few features had some bits of synchronized music, but The Jazz Singer was the first to put them altogether on the Silver…

It has been announced that Mr. Abrams, who directed the re-boot of the Star Trek franchise, will be in charge of the new, Disney owned, Star Wars films. Though I enjoyed the Trek film, I found his use of "flare effect" to be a bit too much for my taste. What will happen if it is overly applied to his new project? Is the man who gave us a new Kirk capable of delivering The Force? Or might it be The Farce?

What do you think?…

1/21/2013 • Markham, Ontario, Canada • UltraLink/XLO Products, an innovative manufacturer of award-winning audio and video interconnects, cables, power products, speakers and personal audio accessories announced introduce the new UltraPLUS line of cablesthe latest and most advanced versions of the popular Ultra™ Series.

Introducing UltraPLUS:…

Another CES has come and gone; this was my 21st. Unlike most of my colleagues in the press corps, I really enjoy going to the show, in part to see all the cool new toys, but more to have some face time with people I otherwise don't get to see in person. Plus, I enjoy the over-the-topness of Las…

Blog Note:  My CES 2013 coverage is split across two blog posts.  This blog covers from Wednesday, January 9, 2013 - Friday, January 11, 2013.

Final Thoughts:

CES 2013 has come to a close and it is great to be home. I have uploaded my complete coverage from…

Blog Note:  My CES 2013 coverage is split across two blog posts.  This blog covers Press Day and Day 1 of CES. 

Tuesday – 1/8/2013 – CES 2013 Day 1 – Part 2…

It is once again time for the Sundance Film Festival!! The online ticket buying process has completed and in spite of an absence of big name directors and not-as-many stars as usual, many films were sold out before we got our chance to buy. Nonetheless, we have an interesting line up of films to see including…

PERFECT8 Technologies

Swedish company PERFECT8 Technologies has shown glass loudspeakers before, this year the new $100,000+ MKll Evolution with a dipole design. DSP controlled 10” drivers flank each side. Combined with a ribbon tweeter, the glass-baffled speaker…

 Here we go again...

CES 2012 was my rookie initiation and let's just say my head was on a swivel the entire time I was on the floor.  Of course, I had always heard about it and had spent many years salivating at the chance to look at "all of those wonderful toys" but I…

Sony 4K/UHD LED-LCD and OLED

Last year, Sony was first out of the 4K/UHD gate with the XBR-84X900, which comes with an Xperia tablet for control and a computer-based server that provides native UHD content. New at CES are two new members of the X900 line, seen…

CES 2013 Wrap-Up



Coming into CES 2013 I wasn’t overly excited by what I was going to see.  OLED panels really excited me last year, but then they didn’t ship, which probably dampened my enthusiasm, and many of the rumored items before the show were things that were either way past the price range of…

Final update..

Panasonic PT-AE8000 which has been available for a couple months, and a new "lamp-free" model that uses hybrid LED/Laser for its light source and a DLP chip.  It is not geared towards the home theater crowd though.  Neither were being demo'd. …

Just in time for the New Year celebration, I received a copy of a new Blu-ray collection from Lionsgate Studios of some of Coppola's best films. This set contains Apocalypse Now/ Apocalypse Now Redux (1979), The Conversation (1974), Tetro (2009) and One From the Heart (1982). True, it does not…

Olive Media Inc. introduced the Olive ONE today, a new high definition music player.  What makes this player especially unique is that the product's development is open to the public via the crowdfunding site IndieGoGo. 

Check out the full press release:…

RED has announced a new 4K player using REDRAY technology.

Looking for some content on that new Ultra HDTV Santa is bring you for Christmas? Here is your chance to upgrade from that (now obsolete) Oppo BDP-103 player...…

EASTON, MA 12/05/12 -- Outlaw Audio, the internet-only audio/video retailer, has introduced an aggressively-priced home theater surround processor that delivers high-performance for the A/V enthusiast on a budget. The new Outlaw Model 975 Surround Processor allows for the creation of a…