FeaturesFeatures
Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2011
- Written by Jim Clements
- Published on 17 October 2011
Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2011 exceeded expectations......so many exhibitors and attendees. Great Show! Exhibitors filled the Denver Marriott Tech Center this past week, October 14-16. Jim Clements, Senior Editor, covered the show for SECRETS of Home Theater this year. And was it busy...some very special sounds and spectacular products. Jim's coverage includes many great names in Audio.....Linn, Legacy Audio, Harman Kardon family, Velodyne, Naim, NAD, Clarus, ClearAudio, OPPO, Acoustic Signature, DynAudio, Emotiva, and so much more.
Wrap-up Commentary......All images are in......50 plus!!!!
The 2011 installment of the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest turned out to be the tale of two technologies. I am personally something of a generational 'tweener'. I was born at the tail end of the Baby Boom Generation - but I'm not really a Baby Boomer and I'm not really a GenXer. I am young enough that there was a computer in my HS math class. I am old enough that I completely grew up on analog audio.
Read Jim's full report and enjoy the spectacular images in the Cave...
Telluride Film Festival 2011
- Written by Rick Schmidt
- Published on 19 September 2011
The place to be over Labor Day Weekend, if you love movies and want to have an advance look at the films that will be released over the next few months, was this years Telluride Film Festival. Rick Schmidt from the SECRETS team and and Festival Photographer Ray Keller made it to 18 films over four days at the 2011 Telluride Film Festival. Most of these films will be making their way to theaters over the next weeks and months and Rick and Ray are thinking that a number of these will be Oscar contenders.
See the full report of the Telluride Festival and the film reviews in the CAVE.
TVs? We Don't Need no Stinking TVs - Third Generation Multi-channel Audio - Part 1
- Written by David A. Rich
- Published on 15 June 2011
Conceptually, multichannel audio makes abundant sense. Practically, however, it has failed with a critical mass of listeners. Quadrasonic sound, circa 1971, was the first setback. While modern analysis of optimal multichannel reproduction now reveals the unfavorable placement of the rear channels, its primary undoing was the intractable challenge of lifting four high-quality discrete channels off a vinyl record.
Ten years ago, the industry tried again with optical disc media. A format war, coupled with the need for special equipment, resulted in little consumer interest, which was already a crowded space with the advent of home theater and portable MP3 players. The Blu-ray audio disc is the new promising third iteration owing to its seamless compatibility with home theater installations.
The audiophile and videophile have not merged into one species........This three-part series outlines the general concepts of an audiophile-friendly third-generation multichannel audio system.
CEDIA 2011 EXPO Show Report
- Written by SECRETS CEDIA Coverage Team
- Published on 08 September 2011
The CEDIA 2011 Expo is back in Indianapolis this year. The SECRETS Team arrived earlier this week and have already seen some impressive new gear. The first reports are in.....Check back frequently for reports from the team: Cynthia Johnson, Chris Heinonen, Robert Kozel, Sumit Chawla, Piero Gabucci and Nick St Denis. David Rich is with the team as well, focusing on some of the technologies with in-depth interviews with the manufacturers.
NEW.....David Rich has added a post show report in the CAVE.
Head for the CAVE. Or for Individual Team Reports, go to Read More for the link.
T.H.E. Show Newport - Show Report
- Written by Niko Coromelas and Michael Galvin
- Published on 06 June 2011
T.H.E. Show: Newport took place last Friday, June 3, through Sunday, June 5, in the Newport Hilton, adjacent to Orange County's John Wayne International Airport. T.H.E. Show: Newport was initiated and organized by Bob Levi, President of the Los Angeles & Orange County Audio Society, and Richard Beers, President of T.H.E. Show. And a very successful and exciting show it was, covering many rooms and six floors of the Hilton. Niko Coromelas and Michael Galvin covered T.H.E. Show for SECRETS of Home Theater....and Niko sums up his first day after covering two floors......" a bit of oversaturation"....completely understandable, just look at the photos from Niko and Michael.....available now in the CAVE. Check back as more photos are added over the next few days.
The California Audio Show July 2011
- Written by Jason Victor Serinus
- Published on 19 July 2011
The second California Audio Show, produced by Constantine Soo of Dagogo.com, took place July 15-17 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Burlingame. If neither attendance nor room layout was exactly what dealers and manufacturers had hoped for, the combination of several fine sounding rooms, live performances, and information-packed seminars left many audiophiles smiling.
Read and enjoy Jason's multi-part report on the California Audio Show....in the CAVE
A Home Theater Build Project - Part III
- Written by Mark Vignola
- Published on 22 March 2011
In this section I'll begin to talk about the ways in which I upgraded my room outside of actual equipment changes. Some of these changes were implemented to improve performance, while others were to improve the overall viewing experience. Either way, many of these are easy things that anyone can do in between the major equipment changes that we are often researching.
TVs? We Don't Need no Stinking TVs - Third-Generation Multi-channel Audio - Part 3
- Written by David A. Rich
- Published on 28 June 2011
It is useful to have the Blu-ray player read downloaded MP3, FLAC, and WAV files off a memory stick. If the player is well designed, the MP3 files should display information on the work and the performer on the TV screen. FLAC files encoded at sampling rates of 96kHz, or a sampling rate or 192kHz, should be bit-accurate at the both the S/PDIF or HDMI outputs. Be careful; many Blu-ray players do not support FLAC data files.
Most Blu-ray players USB ports will also work with Hard Drives. Another option on many Blu-ray players is to find music across a computer network if you establish an Ethernet connection for the Blu-ray player to your computer router. Special software must be resident on the computers. How to do this is way out of the scope of this article.
It is most important that your Blu-ray player should read MP3, FLAC or WAV files that are burned to DVD on a computer.......
See Sidebar: The Impracticality of Analog or DSD signal-transfer in multichannel
Sundance Film Festival 2011
- Written by Rick Schmidt
- Published on 18 February 2011
The news out of Sundance this year was that business is once again booming. We could tell that things were hopping well before the festival too because the online ticket system was showing many shows as sold out. We may have compounded the effect by shifting our attendance to the opening week of the festival. For the past couple of Sundance’s we had attended the less populated second half. This year, for the first half anyway, it was just plain hard to get tickets. Using the online system during our allotted time slot, weeks in advance of the festival, there were many movies already sold out. Red State, the new movie from Kevin Smith (Clerks) sold out in all time slots in 1 day, including a showing at 8:30 am on a Monday morning.
TVs? We Don't Need no Stinking TVs - Third-Generation Multi-channel Audio - Part 2
- Written by David A. Rich
- Published on 21 June 2011
It is not practical to connect your Universal Blu-ray Player to your AVR using an analog connection if you want to listen in multichannel. For similar reasons you should accept that the multichannel DSD data off an SACD is going to have to be transcoded at some point to LPCM. S/PDIF is also not a connection option in multichannel. Options you had in the stereo world are just not workable in the multichannel universe. All of this is explained in the Sidebar: What you need to know to be a multichannel Geek
So what features do we want in the Universal Blu-ray Players HDMI transmission system?
See Sidebar: What you need to know to be a multichannel Geek
DIY Calibration Software - Update: CalMAN 4.1
- Written by Mark Vignola
- Published on 27 January 2011
Since our DIY Calibration software round-up was originally published in May, the CalMAN software has undergone a major upgrade. When we met the SpectraCal folks at CEDIA in September, they were eager to have us try this new software package. I already had some hands on time with CalMAN 4 at the Calibration Bootcamp that I attended earlier this year CalMAN Calibration Bootcamp: A Crash Course in the Science of Calibration, but I hadn’t had enough time to really explore the software on my own system and without the guidance of the SpectraCal training team.
