Well, it’s a week after launch, and I still can’t get the new 3G iPhone. All of my local stores are sold out, with estimates of several weeks before new shipments arrive. That’s what I get for not camping out in line, but I haven’t pulled one of those all-nighters since queuing up for tickets to the 1985 Springsteen tour.

But it got me thinking, when was last time (or any time, for that matter) that a new A/V product caused that level of consumer frenzy? I’m taking the traditionalist view, so game consoles don’t count. Do you recall any piece of audio or video equipment that was so unique, paradigm-shifting, must-have cool that people were lined up to get them and the manufacturer couldn’t keep them in stock? I’m drawing a blank. It does make me wonder what would happen if the designers and engineers at Apple decided to sink their teeth into a traditional home theater product.

Two weeks ago I got wind of a sub-C$400 price on Sony’s BDPS300.  At the time I questioned whether that supplier was on the up and up, but now this past week any number of sources indicate that some price relief on Blu-Ray is in the pipe, at least on players.  Even my local dealer pro actively called me up saying he had new pricing on the coveted Panasonic ‘50.

Finally some indication of long-term incumbency for HD-on-disc.

Movies on the other hand seem to remain at a relatively high premium compared to DVD which, although of no consequence to the movie renting masses,  seems like poor reward for the movie collectors who have driven the market up to the present.

I was helping my son shop for a birthday present, particularly focusing on his interest in a game console. I tried not to nudge him towards a PS3, but a little voice kept saying “Blu-ray player, Blu-ray player. . . .” Eventually, the angel on my other shoulder won out and I decided I would just buy a stand-alone player rather than co-opt my own child’s birthday present. As of today, the best Blu-ray player with Profile 2.0, relatively fast-loading time and a decent price, is the PS3. A game console, for $400.

I appreciate that having the studios line up behind different formats made for an untenable situation. But the “old” Toshiba HD-A2 HD DVD player in my rack, like every other HD DVD player, was based on a stable set of specifications (as Adrian just noted,  BD-Live is still ramping up).  And I paid $99 for it.

I had hoped that, with the end of the format battle, consumers would rapidly see a stable set of specifications, and more players available at a wide range of price points. Especially that all important entry-level player to introduce people to the joys of high-def video (kind of like those $999 HD flat screens).

Well, the big CEDIA show is less than two months away. I can still hope, right?

It’s July 4th weekend here in the U.S., which traditionally means standing over a grill filled with searing animal meat, beer in one hand and BBQ tongs in the other. Why this is an appropriate way to celebrate the birth of our country is the topic of another blog (in a different publication). I have a nice set of Paradigm outdoor speakers, so will at least be able to enjoy my music while manning the grill.

But how about watching a movie in the backyard? Now you can stop by the local big-box store and buy an inflatable outdoor screen. I have seen commercial versions of them at parks, and while not a videophile experience, the image quality is at least on a par with the drive-in movies of my youth; plus you don’t have the metal speaker affixed to the car window or idiots who keep flashing their headlights at the screen every time there’s a romantic scene. Now that’s something I can celebrate.

I had an interesting experience this past weekend that I want to tell you about.

A product that I use for outdoor exercising wore out. This happens about every five years, and I simply replace the product with a new one.

So, I went into the store to get it, and they took me over to a display that showed a new model. It was priced about $150 more than the model l usually purchase. He said there was a $150 rebate on the new model, and the old model was not in stock anyway. It did not appear to have the heft of the old model, but I decided what the heck, and bought one. They gave me a rebate slip that I was supposed to send in and would get my $150 rebate check within a couple of weeks.

OK, so I get home and install the new model. Well, it did not perform nearly as smoothly as the old model. Part of the problem was the lower weight of the new one.

I thought about this and realized what was going on. The company that makes this product didn’t have any competition at first. Now, they have some, and the competition makes good units.

What they are trying to do is build a new version that is much cheaper to manufacture, stock it fully in dealer showrooms, not stock the old one very much, price it higher so you think it is a better model than the old one, offer it with a rebate so you will be tempted to buy the new one (with the rebate, you then get it at the same price as the old model), and slowly work their customer base into using the new, cheaper made model. They raise the price and build it cheaper. What could be better?

Well, how about a customer base that is stupid enough to fall for this? It does not exist. Customers are just too shopping-wise these days. There is too much info out there and we have been screwed too many times before.

So, I took the new model back and said I want the old model. He gave me a $132 refund, with the rest of the money going to pay for the old model when it comes in next week.

The thing I really want to say here is that I have not seen this kind of shady marketing in the Audio Video world, and the reason is that there is just too much competition. There are only three competitors to the exercise product that I bought. There must be 100 speaker manufacturers out there. Anyone who tried to fool us would be out of business within a year. Can you imagine what would be said about them on all the audio video forums?

My cable box went on the fritz last weekend, conveniently while I was out of town. Apparently, it could output sound or video, but not both at the same time. Our box (with dual HDTV tuners) was several years old, and I knew was being replaced by a newer, modern unit. So I wasn’t totally surprised that it was malfunctioning. My wife called the cable company, which promised to send a truck out with a replacement box.

I got the call while driving up Interstate 5. My wife said that the cable guy was confused about how to hook up the interconnects, because the replacement box didn’t have an HDMI port. Uh, what? I got on the phone with the technician, and ran it down. My existing cable box (the broken one), which did have an HDMI port, had been in my home at least two years, and was not a new box when I got it. If the “replacement” box didn’t even have an HDMI port (it was DVI), then that meant that the box was at least two generations older than the newest box. And likely was on its last legs before it too failed, which would require yet another trip.

So I politely told him no thanks, we’d stop by the cable office and pick up a new box. It wasn’t his fault; he could only offer us what he had on the truck. But it made me wonder what a less knowledgeable customer would have done in the same situation.

At my brother’s urging I picked up La Vie end Rose this weekend on DVD….and could barely watch it.

Not the movie itself mind you, which is a very interesting biopic piece, but rather it was the way the DVD was formatted.

Whoever the genius was at the DVD authoring workstation, they decided to encode the film as letterbox-in-4:3-frame.

That alone should be an unforgivable sin this late in the game, but the wrench in the mechanism was the non-negotiable subtitles.

Now I grant that if you have what should now be considered an antiquated 4:3 display system, all of this is of no consequence. But with any conventional widescreen TV setup, the first thing we run into is a loss of potential resolution. We have to force a “zoom” mode in the display system which cuts the top and bottom of the 4:3 frame, usually an inconsequential move from a content point of view since the top and bottom of such letterbox presentations contain encoded nothingness, but ultimatley it yields a picture with 33% less detail compared to if it had been encoded within a 16×9 frame (like virtually every other DVD out there with widescreen content on it).

Now I have a few DVDs like this in my collection, all of which date back to the dawn of DVD I’d like to note, so I can deal with that much. But what made La Vie en Rose impossible to watch was the subtitles. Zooming the frame for best picture-fit on the 16×9 screen causes the subtitles to be cropped.

This blue frame shows the actual content of the DVD, and is exactly how it would appear on a 4:3 TV.	Shown here in green are the extents of a widescreeen TV with the content “zoomed”, preserving the image aspect but cropping the subtitles.

There were only two ways for me to watch the movie and still see the subtitles: Either treat it as if it were 4:3 where we get a so called “window box” presentation with substantial unused screen real estate ALL ARROUND the image, or stretched horizontally such that it appears as nothing more than a distorted “slot” of a film.

“Window box” presentation	Distorted “Slot Vision” presentation

At this point in the life of DVD we are well, WELL past being able to excuse these sorts of things.

Its worth noting that a few of the very high end video processors/scallers have the facility to vertically offset the frame, which particularly speaks to this scenario of letterbox-in-4:3-with-subtitles: they zoom the frame and then shift it up so that the image is still best-fit yet with subtitles still visible. The reason such processors offer this mode is for old DVDs, very old ones, made at a time when the industry was still working out the kinks. Having to employ it for a new release is simply ridiculous.

Now, there is one possible explanation as to why someone would author this DVD the way it was:  the subtitles appear to have been “burned-in” (they are part of the image as oppose to being generated by the DVD player) which might mean they were there before the DVD author even got a hold of the material.  If so, it is plausible that they HAD to do it the way they did it (space wise, the subtitles need to overlap an image which is vertically centered inside a 16×9 workspace), but if that were the case, I would say they should have instead put pressure on the studio to supply a clean video transfer so that they could have done the subtitles using the DVD system as well as author it in the better 16×9 workspace.

On June 18, I attended the product debut of Meridian Audio’s new 810 projector, held at Definitive Audio, in Bellevue, Washington, which is very near Seattle. It has three D-ILA panels, 4,000 lumen output (maximum), and a native resolution of 4,000 x 2,500.  Yes, you read that right, 4,000 x 2,500, and it is a consumer product too, not a projector for a commercial theater.

It is priced at $175,000, and the light engine is made for Meridian by JVC. The projector itself is assembled at Meridian’s factory in the U.K. It takes 4 days just to do the alignment, which is accomplished with a computer. Each 4×4 pixel area on the D-ILA panels can be individually calibrated to produce even illumination across the entire image. The detailed precise calibration is part of what you are paying for with this projector.

Here is a photo:

It is a really big projector and weighs about 130 pounds.

On the front you can see two lenses. The one on the left is anamorphic and a motorized control is used to move it in front of the main lens (seen on the right) when you want to watch 2.35:1 movies using the entire 16:9 chip area.

Here is a close-up of the two lenses.

On the rear are the connections, including four single-link DVI cables (at the left end of the projector) that are needed to carry the very high bitrate signal.

The processor which goes with the projector (included in the price) is shown below. It converts regular DVD video signals (480i) as well as 1,920×1,080 Blu-ray video signals to 4,000×2,500. To keep this in perspective, a 1,080p signal is 2 megapixels for each frame, and the processor converts it to 10 megapixels. That is a lot of horsepower.

Here is the equipment rack for the entire setup which included Meridian’s DVD player and SSP.

There was a full set of Meridian digital speakers, including some new ones that have upsampling capabilities built-in. Remember, Meridian speakers receive a digital signal from the SSP and the DACs in the speakers then convert it to analog signals for the amplifiers, and each driver has its own amplifier. Because the sound from a woofer is slower to get transmitted into the room, the power to the high frequency drivers can be delayed so that the sound from all the drivers goes into the room at the same time.

The subwoofers consisted of two JL Audio F113’s.

The image quality from the Meridian 810 was the best I have ever seen, in any theater, anywhere. Movies that were used included Patton and Cars. Patton was shown because it was shot in 70mm and the color depth was spectacular. As an animated feature, Cars had never gone through a lens until projection, so the detail there was just beyond belief. I got up close to the screen and could not see any pixels at all, in part because of the panel resolution, but also because Meridian uses a new process that involves an analog back plane behind the digital panel.

I also recorded a full high def video (1,920×1,080) of Bob Stuart - President of Meridian Audio - describing the projector system. Click on his photo below to see the video, encoded as a Windows Media Video file (*.wmv). Because the video is high resolution, it will take about two minutes for your player to buffer before the video starts to play, so be patient.

This was my first time attending the Definitive Audio event, which displayed a wide variety of new products. I stayed at the Woodmark Hotel in Kirkland (near Bellevue), right on the water. The entire affair was extremely enjoyable.

We’re starting a series of front projector reviews, including systems that can be used in non-dedicated environments (such as family rooms) without requiring custom installation. I’m guessing that, given the current state of the economy, projectors that can deliver the goods in a multi-use space will become increasingly popular.

As I’ve mentioned before, my home doesn’t have a dedicated theater room, so it is a perfect guinea pig space for these systems. Last Saturday night, I sat the family down on the couch with Transformers (HD DVD), a 1080p projector, 84” screen, and many bowls of popcorn. My six year-old (who has encyclopedic knowledge about Optimus Prime) giggled with delight every time the autobots appeared, while my teenage son stared open-jawed at a larger-than-life Meagan Fox (not that I noticed, of course). Even the wife approved of the movie theater ambience.

Could this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship?

We’re on the brink of analogue OTA finally getting flipped to digital, and hopefully we’ll finally see HD penetration where it should be, yet HDTV still seems to lack critical appeal.

A relative of mine got all setup last Christmas with a nice new LCD HDTV and HD Cable service in their cosy upstairs living area. I helped him set it up and it looks great.

While I was visiting him on the weekend he fired up the baseball game … on his 15 year old 20” tube TV in the downstairs living room.  “Is this game not on in HD upstairs?” I asked.  “Yea…but to tell you the truth, I still watch a lot of TV down here…”  he answered.

That says alot about the state of HDTV.