Tabla de contenidos para April 2018 en Sound & Vision

Philips 50PFL4662/F7 50-Inch Roku TV Roku has been busy adding streaming smarts to televisions from a number of brands, including this 50-inch set from Philips, the top model in the 4000 series of 1080p LCD TVs. Hit the power, and you’re greeted by the Roku home screen, which serves as a gateway to, oh, a half-million or so movies and TV shows across 5,000 streaming channels, including the biggies Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu, etc. Search Master: A key feature of Roku’s new OS 8 operating system is Smart- Guide, which conveniently lists cable and over-the-air (OTA) broadcast channels alongside streaming channels. For local OTA channels (antenna required), the guide goes back seven days and ahead 14 days; it even indicates if a movie or show is available on demand from…

THIS graph shows the AVR-X3400H’s left channel, from CD input to speaker output with two channels driving 8-ohm loads. Measurements for THD+noise, crosstalk, signal-to-noise ratio, and analog/digital frequency response were all within expected performance parameters. Full details available at soundandvision.com. SPECS Power Output: 105 watts (8 ohms, 2 channels driven) • Auto Setup/Room EQ: Audyssey MultEQ XT32 • Video Processing: 4K scaling/passthrough supporting HDCP 2.2, cross-converts analog video to HDMI; HDR (HDR10 and Dolby Vision) via HDMI • Dimensions (WxHxD, Inches): 17.1 x 6.6 x 15.3 • Weight (Pounds): 23.8 • Video Inputs: HDMI 2.0b (8 including 1 front), composite video (3), component video (2) • Audio Inputs: Coaxial digital (2), optical digital (2), USB (1, front); analog line-level stereo (5) • Additional: RJ-45 Ethernet, IR in/out, 12-volt trigger •…

FULL-ON/FULL-OFF Contrast Ratio in HD/SDR: 22,800:1 MEASUREMENTS were made with SpectraCal’s CalMAN software, Photo Research PR-650 and Klein K-10A color meters, and Murideo and DVDO pattern generators. The control settings used here will be posted at soundandvision.com. All measurements were taken at approximately 14 feet from a 96-inchwide, 1.3-gain, Stewart Filmscreen StudioTek 130 screen. (DELTA E as referenced below is a figure of merit indicating how close the color comes to the standard at each point in the brightness range. Values below 3—some experts allow for 4—are generally considered visually indistinguishable from ideal.) The peak white reading for the contrast ratio was 22.78 ft-L (78.1 nits) and the black level 0.001 ft-L (0.0034 nit). At maximum zoom, the full-on/full-off contrast ratio measured 13,685:1; at minimum zoom, 33,370:1. The black levels…

PRICE $999 SOME PEOPLE ARE JUST GOOD at things. People like Rembrandt van Rijn, who could make a painted image gaze into your soul; or Meryl Streep, who can be Anna Wintour one moment and Julia Child the next; or Warren Buffett, who’s been known to make his shareholders a dollar or two; or Billie Holiday, who could sing like Louis Armstrong’s trumpet and fit a lifetime of hard loving into a single phrase. Companies can be good at things, too. Klipsch, for instance, became famous for their horn-loaded drivers under founder Paul W. Klipsch. In the last couple of decades, the brand has parlayed its expertise in horns into a commanding position in the compact speaker category, marketing one bestselling satellite/ subwoofer set after another. The Sixth Generation The…

Being a bodyguard is a tough business, but Michael Bryce was at one time considered the best, earning him the distinction of being a triple-A executive protection agent. Unfortunately, if you lose a client, your life will take a turn for the worse, which is exactly what happened to Bryce when he wasn’t able to successfully protect a distinguished Japanese client. Two years have gone by, and in order to make a living, he’s resorted to protecting second-class clients—like lawyers. Luckily for him, he gets a request from Interpol to escort an internationally renowned hitman, Darius Kincaid, from Manchester to the Hague in order to testify against a ruthless dictator, who has dispatched a team of assassins to ensure that the witness never arrives. I generally don’t like these types…

Director/Producer Steven Soderbergh is an admirably free thinker, a true creative with an eye on the future of filmmaking. He’s very particular about the projects he chooses, emerging from pseudo-retirement to direct his latest, Logan Lucky. Made largely outside the Hollywood system he walked away from, it still managed to score some A-list talent on a modest budget, with James Bond and Kylo Ren likely welcoming the opportunity to play against type, as a down-on-his-luck explosives expert and a goodhearted sad-sack, respectively. Star Channing Tatum plays it safe as yet another nice guy with a bad-boy streak, willing to do anything for his daughter. This time out, that means ignoring his family curse and risking everything to knock off the Charlotte Motor Speedway, home of NASCAR. Logan Lucky soon reveals…

Ah, the ’70s—the literal age of excess, as documented by the “everything, all the time” lifestyle credo personified by pop-music superstars like the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. And yet, amidst all that glamour, glitz, and high drama also resided some damn fine music, too. Listen closely, and you’ll clue into a good bit of prescient social commentating by artists very much aware of the pitfalls of their experimentations, even while they basked in the afterglow. Indeed, could there have been a more flawless representation of those gritty Bicentennial times than the Eagles’ 1976 masterpiece, Hotel California, one of the best-selling albums of our time? (The current official tally: over 16 million units sold in the U.S. alone, and 32 million worldwide and counting.) Hotel California’s continuing aural and cultural impact…

In the very first issue of HiFi & Music Review in 1958, the magazine that became Stereo Review and then Sound & Vision, a gifted 31-yearold artist named Charles Rodrigues contributed the first in a string of cartoons that both celebrated, and made fun of, that odd bird known as the audiophile. It ended up being a long run that lasted more than 40 years. Rodrigues’s humorous insight into the audiophile’s mind and his world (the hobby remains, to this day, predominantly male), proved the perfect counterpoint to the dry, technical business of reviewing components, and what Rodrigues saw as the ever-rising prices of gear and increasingly bizarre claims made by manufacturers as the years went on. His themes covered wide ground. Audio salesmen were a frequent target, a breed…

PRICE $500 TEN YEARS AGO, WHO WOULD have figured that almost every major new music release would also get issued on vinyl? Every day, more and more people are learning to appreciate the appeal of vinyl records—but sadly, the lack of portability means that for most of us, it’s a stay-at-home listening experience. That can be frustrating in a world where we’ve become so accustomed to digesting our music on the go; consequently, lots of new vinyl records come bundled with a lossy-compressed digital copy as a free download. Of course, listening to such downloads means that we’re no longer getting the vinyl experience at all—so really, what’s the point? What if, instead of those crappy MP3 files we’ve had to endure for so long, we could capture some of…

Since the Sony VPL-VW285ES I reviewed in February/March (available at soundandvision.com) was still on hand while I was reviewing the JVC DLA-X790R, a brief comparison with the JVC was impossible to resist. At just $5,000, the VPL-VW285ES is the least expensive native 4K projector Sony has yet released. But it does sacrifice some feature content to achieve its price—notably any sort of mechanical iris to improve black levels beyond the dynamic contrast enhancement included with this model. At $1,000 more, the JVC adds a dynamic iris but sacrifices the Sony’s native 4K resolution for enhanced 1080p resolution with 4K sources via e-shift5 technology. To perform the comparison, I linked the two projectors to my Oppo UDP-203 Ultra HD Blu-ray player through an AVPro 4K-capable splitter. I had to make a…

RTP Satellite (purple) +4.68/–2.06 dB, 200 Hz to 10 kHz; –3 dB @106 Hz, –6 dB @ 96 Hz; impedance minimum 5.00 ohms @ 360 Hz, phase angle –49.30º @ 213 Hz; sensitivity 86 dB, 500 Hz to 2 kHz. RTP Center (green) +3.29/–1.63 dB, 200 Hz to 10 kHz; –3 dB @ 109 Hz, –6 dB @ 97 Hz; impedance minimum 5.02 ohms @ 379 Hz, phase angle –41.41º @ 241 Hz; sensitivity 89 dB from 500 Hz to 2 kHz. R-8SWI (blue) Close-miked response, normalized to level at 80 Hz: lower –3 dB @ 33 Hz, –6 dB @ 31 Hz, upper –3 dB @ 133 Hz w Low Pass control set to maximum. SPECS RTP Satellite: 3.5 in IMG cone woofer (1), 0.75 in aluminum dome tweeter…

PRICE $200-$500 plus service plan WITH FOLKS CHATTING UP THEIR smart speakers and smart TVs, TiVo owners may have felt like they were living in the silent era of cinema. Being behind the tech ball was especially galling for the TiVo community, which, not unlike the Apple fanbase, is willing to pay more for superior technology. In late 2017, TiVo, a name synonymous with the DVR, finally responded with a new remote and interface that recognize the value of voice recognition— especially when a viewer is searching for something to watch from among innumerable over-the-air, cable, streaming, and recordedprogram options. The TiVo Bolt Vox is the company’s first DVR to come with a listening remote. Physically, the Vox is identical to the TiVo Bolt Unified Entertainment System I reviewed previously…

David Leitch is known mostly as a stunt coordinator on big action films like Tron: Legacy, but for Atomic Blonde he steps behind the camera as the big man in charge to direct an adaptation of the graphic novel series The Coldest City by Antony Johnson and Sam Hart. The movie is fairly dripping in neon and ’80s nostalgia. Charlize Theron stars as sexy Cold War MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton, tasked to go into East Berlin and work with embedded station chief David Percival (James McAvoy) in order to find a sensitive dossier known as The List as communism is on the verge of collapsing and the Berlin Wall is literally about to crumble. Things go sideways the minute she lands and is made an agent by the Soviets. It’s…

Bringing Stephen King novels to the big screen is always fraught with conundrums, the expansive detail not often translating well to film. Condensing the eight Dark Tower novels into a single sub-100 minute movie seemed especially ambitious. The Dark Tower screenwriters plucked bits and pieces from the series, beginning in the middle and crafting a tale from there. The bulk of the film follows young Jake Chambers, whose powerful “shine” has him struggling with dark visions too real to be dreams. Jack stumbles across a portal that transports him to Mid-World where he joins the last remaining gunslinger, Roland Deschain, on his quest to hunt down The Man in Black and stop his plans to destroy the Dark Tower, a mystical nexus point that stands at the heart of all…

There are lots of cool aspects to my job as a custom installer, but my favorite is installing home theater systems. And when designing a surround system with a customer, one of the first discussions is whether they should go with a direct-view, flat-panel display or with a two-piece projection system. Sometimes this choice is obvious; either due to room size, budget, aesthetic demands, or some construction issue that dictates one over another. Other times it’s grayer. Below are some reasons why one or the other might be right for you. The Pros of Projection No Size Limits. With a projection system, you can project an image as large as your front wall—or viewing distance—supports. Also, unlike a traditional display, the price difference between a 100-, 110-, or 120-inch screen…

PRICE $999 DENON’S NEW AVR-X3400H A/V receiver scored points with me even before I got it out of its box: The four-piece packaging foam (top/ bottom front and back) allows for easy removal of a heavy-ish item without battling box flaps, splintering full end-cap pieces, or leaving a trail of Styrofoam crumbs behind. (Yes, I’m packing-material obsessive.) But let me not prejudge. Once out of the box, the AVR-X3400H appeared as a familiar example of the receiver genus: black chassis, lots of jacks, two knobs, and a few buttons. (Denon has—sensibly, in my view—abandoned most front-panel controls other than source select and volume. So don’t lose that remote control!) At $999, this seven-channel receiver slots in just above the middle of Denon’s 11-model lineup, which means it features most of…

PRICE $6,000 ONE OF THE KEY FEATURES OF the Ultra HD format is 4K resolution. But to date, the catalog of true native 4K home theater projectors—those with imaging chips featuring a minimum of 3840 x 2160 pixels without relying on any pixel-shifting tricks—is pretty thin. JVC has the laser-lit DLA-RS4500K at $35,000, and Sony has its own premium models above $10,000. But if you’re looking for something priced more affordably, you’re currently limited to Sony’s new VPL-VW285ES ($5,000) and VPL-VW385ES ($8,000). Beyond this, if you want a UHD-friendly projector, you’re looking at so-called “pixel-shifters,” which flash up successive frames of video from lesser-resolution imaging devices in an effort to achieve higher subjective resolutions. A handful of projectors now use DLP’s latest 4K chip, which delivers all the signal information…

PRICE $1,000 INTEGRATED AMPLIFIERS designed for use both on the desktop and in the listening room are a niche category that we’ve looked at before, most recently in reviews of Elac’s $699 Element EA101EQ-G and Cary Audio’s AiOS (April 2017 and December 2017 issues, respectively; both reviews available at soundandvision.com). But of all the hi-fi manufacturers working this space, TEAC is the one that embraces it most enthusiastically. The company offers a full lineup of compact, desktop-friendly integrated amps, including the new AI-503 ($1,000), a model that combines an asynchronous USB input (for a computer), a dedicated headphone amp, and hi-res-capable Bluetooth streaming (more on that in a bit). The key to the AI-503’s compactness is its use of a high-efficiency Class D amplifier from Denmark’s ICEpower, which eliminates the…

PRICE $199 THE FULL IMPACT OF THE home-based voice-actuated assistant, invented first by Amazon in the guise of Alexa, then followed by Google and now Apple with its Siri-driven HomePod, has yet to be felt. The category has loosely evolved into what we are now calling the “smart speaker,” though it is not the speaker, but the microphone (or mic array) in conjunction with a network connection that imbues these devices with their extraordinary power. Sure, the speaker plays music, perhaps the simplest of its voice-controlled functions (and according to a recent study by NPR/ Edison Research, the activity a smart speaker is still most frequently used for). But the opportunity presented by an artificially intelligent device that can respond to human language and trigger any number of events in…

Too Much Valerian... Valerian is director Luc Besson’s passion project: He wrote and directed it based on a French comic book he loved as a child. It’s also the most expensive independent film ever, with a budget of around $180 million. It’s quite the spectacle, and the plot—involving displaced aliens amidst a multi-species space station—could be a reasonable foundation for a sci-fi adventure or sci-noir procedural. Unfortunately, the acting, character development, and dialogue are simply terrible. Ironically, the only believable character is a shape-shifting burlesque dancer played by Rihanna. You sure you know what you’re doing?” However, like Besson’s The Fifth Element, Valerian may thrive less as a sci-fi classic and more as a home theater demo disc. Valerian’s 2K digital intermediate was upscaled to 4K for Blu-ray, and it…

In the original Cars, from 2006, hotshot racecar Lightning McQueen learned to be a gracious winner but a winner nonetheless. In Cars 2, Pixar learned that they could produce a less than sparkling sequel. Now, in Cars 3, the second Disney-Pixar property to produce a threequel (after Toy Story 3), McQueen is getting older, losing his edge, and suffering both losses and trash talk from newer, sleeker, faster racers. But he goes back into training, gets up to speed (so to speak), and is on the verge of motoring back to the top when….OK, you don’t expect spoilers, do you? In my first viewing on a projector and big screen, I was put off by the film’s slow start, lame humor (Mater has little more than a bit part here,…

War for the Planet of the Apes concludes a trilogy that began with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011. It tells the story of Caesar, from a nascent, intelligent ape to the leader of a band of smart simians. Humankind here has been nearly wiped out, with the survivors fighting to retain their freedom and humanity. In a twist from the classic 1968 original, however, the humans here are the villains, and the apes, fleeing the remnants of an army led by an obsessed, Ahab-like colonel, are the heroes. We’re driven to root for the Apes, from the story’s beginning to its near-biblical conclusion. I’m not totally on board with the deviations here from the 1968 original, nor with some of the symbolism used. And there isn’t…