NOTE:  The opinions offered in these Blogs are mine and mine alone.  The purpose of these Blogs is to entertain you, inform you, and possibly give you a good reason to consider A-V Services as your audio and video provider!

  05/12/2008   

If this industry seems like it is being run by lunatics, sometimes that is actually the case.  Certainly the fine folks at Sony and Toshiba who gave us two exciting format wars in a row (Beta vs VHS, HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray) are excellent examples of insanity at work.  And this is not to disparage lunatics.  There are probably a lot of people under psychiatric care who would laugh at these two electronics giants!

 

But it looks like the latest format war is over and while the best man arguably did not win, there is at least a clear winner!  Look for Blu-Ray player prices to start dropping, but there is good reason to believe that the technology may never reach the magic <$100 point.  We’ll see!

 

Lighting Control

 Fortunately, upon occasion, somebody does come along with a better idea that does what it is supposed to do and does it all the time!  Lutron is a privately held American company.  The company was founded by Joel and Ruth Spira in 1961.  It is an American company with ALL devices made here in the U.S.  Joel invented the electronic dimmer and he is still involved on a daily basis with the company operations. So what the heck is lighting control and why the heck should I care, you ask? The most basic control of course is the light switch.  Flick up for ON; flick down for OFF.  Pretty simple stuff.  The light switch however, is an “all or none” proposition.  When the switch is off, the light it is controlling is 100% off.  When the switch is on, the light is 100% on.  This is neither economic nor pleasing to most eyes.  Imagine if the volume on your television had just two settings:  “off” or “all the way up”!  Or if your shower had just two temperatures:  “freezing your butt cold” or “scalding your butt hot”! So Joel Spira invented an electronic dimmer that enables us to turn on a light or lamp and adjust its output by gradients until the output is at a level that we can tolerate, or need for a specific activity.  After all, watching a movie or heading to the bathroom in the middle of the night require a different level of lighting than reading a book or chopping onions. The dimmer has helped our control of lighting in hundreds of ways, but there are still limitations.  First, you need to access each dimmer physically to change the lighting level in a room, and second, the standard dimmer has no memory so you have to re-set it manually to whatever level is desired.  And of course there is no system by which all of your dimmers can be linked. Until now.  Lutron’s next development was programmable lighting control. Works great, enables the creation of “scenes” and “zones”.  But expensive and requires lots of wiring. So Lutron introduced Radio Ra.  Named after the Egyptian sun god (who apparently had little to do with the design process! Lol), Radio RA offers full lighting control using programmable dimmers and radio frequency for communication. I won’t go into all of the technical specifics on the Radio Ra systems, but suffice to say that the system is effective, 100% operational, and easy to retro-fit.  Does NOT require additional wiring.  DOES require programming and a bit of artistic skill to set up lighting scenes.   When done well, Radio Ra gives you a number of advantages: 

• Convenience
• Safety
• Energy Savings
• Enhancement of home’s decor

 **********Imagine returning home late at night and being greeted by a fully lit house!  Warm and welcoming, all of the lights that you want on are turned on by a single touch of a button located on the visor of your car!  Another button controls your garage door!  Imagine rising in the morning to lights on in the bathroom and hallway, but dim in the bedroom for those still sleeping. Imagine turning those same lights off (while turning the outdoor lights on) at night with a single touch of a button on the keypad sitting on the nightstand next to your bed. Imagine the energy savings when using lighting controlled by dimming rather than with the old-fashioned on-off switches.  A light dimmed to 50% brightness still permits excellent vision, but uses just 50% of the electricity used by a light that is “full-on”! Imagine these and many other scenarios that are possible with the Lutron Safe Entry Starter System.  Designed by the leader in lighting, this system of lighting control uses no extra wiring!  Not just a dimmer, but a system of lighting control that allows you to save time, energy, money, and enjoy your home to its fullest.  System is flexible and easily expandable, and best of all can be installed in any house, old or new! ********** 

We have committed to Lutron and to Radio Ra as our value-added service.  Whether you want your home theater to have that little extra “wow” or you would like to find out what lighting control can do for your home in general, I would like to hear from you! 

  

Next time, we’ll talk about music servers and how to incorporate a home network into your entertainment systems!

 

NOTE:  The opinions offered in these Blogs are mine and mine alone.  The purpose of these Blogs is to entertain you, inform you, and possibly give you a good reason to consider A-V Services as your audio and video provider!

  02/26/08 

            Back again!   While the end of the Great format War is not exactly earth-shaking news, it is certainly good news even for those of us who are “stuck” with HD-DVD players.  At least now there will be no confusion as to which format to purchase and no wondering why I can watch this movie on my new player, but not another one.

 

            For those of you who have not kept up, or are just peripherally aware of this whole mess, here’s a quick “down and dirty” on what went on and what has finally occurred.

 

            Essentially, Standard Definition DVDs (those which we have been watching and purchasing since about 1998) were mastered and produced in a format that gave us 480 lines of video resolution.  DVD was far superior to VCR tapes and to standard cable or satellite programs.  They were the “cat’s meow” in video pictures until High Definition Television landed on our planet.  HDTV gave us resolutions of 720 lines and/or 1080 lines.  As long as the program source was also shot and edited in one of these High Definition formats, the resulting picture was sharper, more detailed, and had richer color saturation. 

 

            Not to be outdone, various big electronics manufacturers began to develop High Definition technologies for the exploding DVD market.  High Definition DVD for the home would be the Next Big Thing.  However, the two major players—Sony and Toshiba—developed technologies that were incompatible with each other, but basically did the same things, and did them pretty much equally well.   With billions of dollars, ye, loonies, Euros, pesos, etc etc on the line, compromise made the most sense.   Of course, there was no compromise and thus HD-DVD (Toshiba) went to war with Blu-Ray(Sony). 

 

            Very much line the old VHS versus BETA battle, except that this time around the major studios picked sides.  Studios A,B, and C supported and put out material in one format while D,E, and F supported the other format.  A couple of studios put out their programs in both, but for the most part, if you bought one player and the movie you wanted to watch was only made in the other format, you were out of luck. 

 

            Neither side looked willing to give in, give up, or settle with the other.  BUT the scales were tipped when Warner Brothers, who had originally been releasing movies in both formats, decided to knock out HD-DVDs as of May and will now do Blu-Ray only.  That was the kick to the groin, a major surprise to Toshiba.  Then Wal-Mart announced that they would only sell Blu-Ray discs and would no longer offer the HD-DVD format.  That was the kick to the head.  Down, out, and darn near gone!

 

            The studios still in the HD-DVD camp (Universal, Paramount, and Dreamworks) claim that they will continue to offer titles in that format, but since the players will be phased out and no longer made, it is inevitable that these studios will phase out HD-DVD as well.

 

            Let’s be clear though.  If you did purchase an HD-DVD player, there are still plenty of titles available and pretty much exclusively, at least at this point.  AND, the units I’ve seen are excellent Standard Definition DVD players, so don’t throw them out in anger, but begin saving your bucks for a Blu-Ray player to become your primary DVD machine.

 

            I don’t carry the Sony line of products, but I do carry Samsung and Sharp, and both offer excellent Blu-Ray machines. These DO outperform the Sony Playstation so I would recommend avoiding the Playstation as your primary DVD player unless you are very much a video gamer.

 

            We currently have the HD-DVD version of the Digital Video Essentials, but I just ordered the Blu-Ray version, so we will be able to calibrate your theater systems for either or both formats.  Don’t be fooled.  Even with the increased resolution of the televisions and the players, calibration is still an essential if you want to get the most out of your system.

  

NO BLACK BARS

 

            Are you considering making the move into a dedicated projector/screen based home theater?  If so, then of course you should be calling me.  This is what we do and the part of the business that I truly love!

 

            You will be hearing (if you haven’t already) about various methods of stretching or manipulating an image so as to fill more of the screen, or even fill a wider screen.  This, along with High Definition, is one of the exciting developments that has come along, a legitimate development with legitimate benefits. 

 

            A quick explanation of shapes (aspect ratio).  Think of your old 19 inch televisions as screens with an almost squarish shape.  This shape had an exact ratio of 4 to 3.  Essentially a screen that was four inches wide would then be three inches high.  Twenty inches wide would be fifteen inches high.  Salesmen would refer to this as a 4:3 aspect ratio and the true mathematical term would be 1.33:1.  In the Old Days, TV shows were shot in this aspect ration and naturally filled the entire screen of your TV set.  Even movies which were shot in a wider aspect ratio filled your screen because the kind folks of the broadcast networks chopped up movies, eliminated the information on each side of the original picture and threw them out  for our enjoyment!

 

            Then came HD and widescreen displays.  These screens and widescreen televisions were made in a wider aspect ratio of 16:9 or technically, 1.78:1.  This as opposed to the old 1.33:1.

 

            Most High Definition programs are shot in this aspect ration and of course are made to fit this screen shape.  However, films are often shot in an even wider aspect ratio:  2.35:1 or wider.  This meant that when putting a 2.35:1 picture onto a 1.78:1 screen, if you were retain all of the picture and maintain the correct geometry (no too-skinny or too-fat shapes—circles should look like circles!), the width of th4 picture would fill the screen while the height would be less than that of the screen.  Thus, black bars on top and bottom of the picture.

 

            As a side note, when watching an old or non-HD program in 1.33:1 on a 1.78:1 screen, we would have the correct height filling the screen, but would have bars on each side!

 

            Now, one of the disadvantages of this technology is that when re-working a 2.35:1 movie to fit onto the 1.78:1 screen, the image is “processed” so that it fits onto the display device’s panel, but actually uses up only about two thirds of that panel’s available pixels.  The black bars on top and bottom are still part of the overall picture resolution.  They don’t take the 768 or 1080 lines of the display and scrunch them to get the bars.  They use the middle of the display for the movie and the top and bottom portions for the bars.  You are not only seeing black bars instead of picture, you are also not using up all of your display device’s performance capability.

 

            Now along comes Runco.  And yes, several other manufacturers have followed suit, but Runco did this first and seem to do it best—processing is their major forte.

 

            What Runco did was develop a three-pronged technology.  The first prong is internal processing.  They take the original incoming source—a 2.35:1 movie—and process that to fit onto a 1.78:1 DLP projector panel.  This uses all of the pixels on the panel for picture information.  Now, alone, this would appear on a screen as a narrow picture—everything there, but extremely squished on each side.  However, the second prong is a physical lens that attaches to the projector and spreads the image out to the correct geometry.  Of course, if this were shown on a 1.78:1 screen, the side information would be outside of the screen and displayed on your wall!

 

            So, the third prong is of course a 2.35:1 screen!  Now, we have a wide wide screen filled with picture, everything and everybody looking to be the right shape and NO BLACK BARS! 

 

            You have to see this technology in action to really appreciate what Runco has done and what they have done superbly.  And of course, we have to be dealing with a system that will be used primarily for movie-viewing.  When viewing a 1.78:1 program on this new 2.35:1 screen, we need to consider dark masking because we will have black sidebars for this shape of material.

            We are moving forward with our new in-house showroom and the projector/screen combo that we will be installing will utilize this new technology.  Soon as it is completed, invites for special screenings will go out in an upcoming newsletter!

 

            ‘nuff for today.  Sorry for the delay in blogging, but things have been hectic around here and well, I just didn’t have a whole lot to talk about!

 

Best,

Tim

 

NOTE: The opinions offered in these Blogs are mine and mine alone. The purpose of these Blogs is to entertain you, inform you, and possibly give you a good reason to consider A-V Services as your audio and video provider.

9/24/07 CEDIA UPDATE:

First, let me say that the downtown of Denver, Colorado is clean and safe. We were walking around the area at midnight and later and there were people everywhere, eating, drinking, walking, shopping, socializing, and spending money! Of course, here in the Midwest, we can envy Denver’s position, but we must also realize that Denver is a young city that did not develop like we did. They don’t have many of the problems we have, but that doesn’t excuse us from trying!

The trade show took up four days in September. Larry Zolata and I went out there and attended the Friday and Saturday sessions. Nothing earthshaking at the show, but here are a few of the developments that struck me:

Runco news:

The Big News was Sam Runco selling Runco International (www.runco.com ) to Planar, a huge maker of flat panels and industrial display gear. Big company and everyone was saying the right things and making nice. Only time will tell if this deal is a good thing for us, but it is certainly a good deal for Sam!

First result of this sale is a 42” HD plasma that rolls in at $9K, but is WEATHERPROOF!!!!. You can’t locate it IN a swimming pool, but out BY the pool is fine! And the things looks stunning in direct sunlight! This very cool and practical piece will be available through A-V Services! Call for more info!

Also, a 103” plasma at $100K. Call now to order!

Also from Runco, wide wide screen projector system! Now we can eliminate those annoying black bars with some stunning projectors. They were showing Cinewide and Autoscope and they have introduced the RS-900, a 1080p DLP for under $10K to which we can add Runco’s patented Cinewide for use with a 2:35-1 screen! Sometime very soon, I am going to be displaying this projector at my home and creating a theater room for you to visit and see this exciting new technology in action! As the project progresses, I will keep y’all posted!

Control:

We are stepping up to the plate this year with Elan Home systems (www.elanhomesystems.com) . They offer the best value in home control and integration. We will be utilizing many of their fine products in our future installs. Audio and video distribution, lighting control (through Lutron programmable products), touch-screens, and a wide range of in-wall and in-ceiling products by Elan will now be available from A-V Services. Call for a consultation. Many of these systems can be retrofit, though new construction is our primary target.

LCD versus Plasma:

Ok, this contest is getting closer with each generation of LCD TV. I still prefer plasma as the best available picture, but many of the issues that have plagued LCD are either solved or very close to being solved. Elimination of motion artifacting and deep black levels in the new Runcos, Sharps and Toshibas are outstanding. We are going to be recommending LCD for all but the most discriminating customers. If budget or ambient lighting is not an object, we will recommend Runco plasmas, but if you need the bright pop of LCD and want to hold to a budget, then the LCD flat panels may be the best choice for you!

Equalization:

We are renewing our relationship with Audio Control (www.audiocontrol.com) . They have introduced some very interesting products that will enable us to help you get the absolute most out of the audio portion of your a/v system. We already own and use their SA-3052 Real Time Analyzer and by adding an Audio Control equalizer, we can tune your gear to your listening environment, knocking out bass anomalies, wall reflections, and other acoustic problems.

OK, enough for now! Please stay tuned for more news and more of my thoughts!

Tim Campbell