Sound & Vision January 2019

STREAMING LONG AGO supplanted playing discs as my go-to method for listening to music. Sure, I still have stacks of LPs and CDs in my living room, but they mostly serve as quaint reminders of an earlier time when I would linger for hours in record shops. After music downloading took off almost two decades back (see “Digital Music Players: A Compressed History” on page 17 for an overview of downloading’s early days) and those shops began to shutter, I found myself coming to depend almost exclusively on Amazon to satisfy my physical media-collecting needs. Buying discs online was never as satisfying as visiting shops, but it was quick and Amazon always seemed to have what I wanted in stock. Now that I’ve gone all-in with music streaming, mainly via Tidal,…

Speaking of nostalgia, the October/November issue marked the official conclusion of our Stereo Review 60th anniversary celebration. Many subscribers loved reading about the old days of Julian Hirsch and company—our reprint of the Nakamichi Dragon cassette deck in particular generated lots of reader response. Others, however, chimed in to encourage us to restore the magazine’s print space to other, more contemporary concerns. Starting with this issue, that’s exactly what we plan to do. In the meantime, a former writer from Video magazine, the title that Stereo Review merged with in 1999 to form Sound & Vision, recently shipped me a big box of vintage issues of that publication. If the prospect of reading reprints of articles covering the early days of home video (VHS and S-VHS VCRs, laserdiscs and laserdisc…

Space: The Vinyl Frontier Ken Pohlmann is a hair less infallible when it comes to analog: In his September 2018 column on cassettes, he said that turntables “don’t work in outer space (the whole gravity thing).” Actually, they’d work quite well, as long as they had record clamps and dynamic-balance tonearms. Those arms don’t depend on gravity for tracking force—they’re neutrally balanced, with tracking force supplied by a spring. Fairchild had such an arm ca. 1960, which they demonstrated by playing a record upside down. More recently, Dual automatic turntables had dynamic balance. Doubtless there are others. Ivan Berger Via email Ken Pohlmann responds: I think Ivan is on to something here! Should we also secure the turntable chassis to the spaceship so it does not counter-rotate against the platter (Newton’s third law)? Our…

A notable trend spotted at the 2018 CEDIA expo, which took place at the San Diego Convention Center in September, was the presence of actual 8K display products—not just prototypes destined for release “at a future date.” JVC demonstrated its new flagship DLA-NX9 D-ILA projector ($17,999), a model with an all-glass lens system that uses 8K/e-shift technology to display images at 8,192 x 4,230-pixel resolution. The DLA-NX9 is spec’d as having a 100,000:1 native contrast ratio (1,000,000:1 dynamic contrast) and is HDR10-compatible, with wide color gamut capability that exceeds the DCI/P3 range. It also features auto tone-mapping to optimize the display of HDR content based on the brightness level a source was mastered at (e.g., 1,000 nits). While the DLA-NX9 isn’t capable of accepting a native 8K signal, the company’s Multiple…

Another news item to come out of CEDIA was the debut of a new breed of gear sporting IMAX Enhanced logos. Similar to THX, this is a certification process for A/V components and content that provides consumers with specific performance guarantees. On the audio side, IMAX Enhanced A/V receivers and surround processors will be outfitted with a special IMAX mode. An enhanced version of the DTS-X immersive codec, the mode aims to bring an IMAX theater sound experience to the home theater environment. On the video side, a “proprietary post-production process developed by IMAX to digitally re-master content to produce more vibrant colors, greater contrast, and sharper clarity” aims to enhance the visual experience with IMAX certified TVs and projectors. Another goal of certification: to maintain the taller aspect ratio…

Sad news arrived in late October for film fans seeking an alternative to the increasingly original content-driven Netflix: the FilmStruck streaming service was being shut down by its new corporate parent, AT&T. Launched in 2016, FilmStruck was created by Turner Classic Movies to address the needs of classic, foreign, and independent film buffs. It was the Criterion Collection’s exclusive U.S. streaming partner, and also hosted titles from Warner Bros., MGM, Oscilloscope Laboratories, and Shout! Factory. At press time, the Criterion Collection hadn’t announced plans for moving its library to a new streaming home base.…