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There is some, but its a small niche.
http://www.avsforum.com/forum/...
https://www.hraudio.net/music....

QLED is a con, but for entirely different reasons than you state. Samsung where extremely light on details when they introduced their QLED televisions, but questioning by AV sites revealed that these are not electroluminescent quantum dot displays, but are in fact LCD displays with a quantum dot backlight. It's a lot like Samsung's so called LED displays, that are again just LCD displays with an LED backlight. There's no denying that these quantum dot LCDs are a significant improvement over standard LCD, but they still possess many of the drawbacks of LCD, and to market them as quantum dot displays is misleading.

Companies are working on true electroluminescent quantum dot displays, with BOE being the first to demonstrate prototypes. There are some pictures here, and another article here. There's a video somewhere but I can't find it right now. Digitimes reported that Samsung have prototype electroluminescent quantum dot displays that they have not yet shown publicly, and other Chinese manufacturers besides BOE are working on the technology.

It still looks like its a good few years before we'll see commercial electroluminescent quantum dot displays, and micro-LED displays may have taken off by then. I'm still waiting for a decent computer monitor. It is insane that nearly 20 years later you still can't get a monitor that comes close to the Sony GPD-FW900.

iTunes sucks: A GIF guide to why Apple’s desktop music app must be fixed

Why does iTunes suck so incredibly much?

iTunes sucks, we all know it. What are my options for music player (nonstreaming) on the iPhone 6s?

Why I Hate iTunes: Syncing Sucks And So Does Selecting Music

Can iTunes suck anymore than it already does?

iTunes Really Is That Bad

Apple’s iTunes Is Alienating Its Most Music-Obsessed Users

Eleven Reasons Why iTunes Sucks

Why does Itunes SUCK SO MUCH ???

Again: no, people are not happy using iTunes. People use iTunes because Apple requires it for their expensive iDevices. They hate it, but they want to sync music to their iPhones.

You're saying that my assertion about video players is a "no true Scotsman" fallacy? That's a laugh. You just didn't want to dig your hole deeper by responding to what I said. Video players are not designed to deal with large music libraries, nor should they be. A sports car can be used to take lots of cleaning supplies between cleaning jobs, but a utility van will be far better suited to the task. Your choice of VLC to support this notion is especially hilarious. The VLC media library is like only using the Winamp playlist for your entire music collection.

Or perhaps you meant that foobar2000 is not the true Scotsman. In that case, you missed my arguments about the interface being poorly designed.

Now here's a real laugh for you regarding your sneering at Winamp market share. While I don't have stats from anywhere today, Lifehacker did a survey in 2013 to find out what the readers thought was the best desktop music player and in the end Winamp was the winner. So at least in 2013, 16 years after Winamp was released, it was still the preferred player for everyone that read Lifehacker at the time. Unfortunately, most articles seem to omit or only "honorably mention" Winamp based on it no longer being developed which at this point is really only a problem for people who want double size mode to look better or want to sync a modern iPod with Winamp (yes, Winamp used to sync iPods.)

I'm sure iTunes can play music back on garbage hardware while multitasking. Maintaining a 44.1 kHz 16-bit stereo audio stream while multitasking was easily done by Winamp in 1997 on an original Pentium, so why wouldn't it be possible to do the same thing today on a bargan-basement Celeron that's slow for browsing but still two orders of magnitude faster than an original Pentium? It's not hard to have a realtime-priority and heavily optimized thread that does nothing but decompress music file data and pass it to the sound system. Good luck switching between iTunes and other stuff in 2GB of RAM while trying to do some actual work.

One more thing was never addressed. You never elaborated on why "underlying frameworks" is some sort of selling point. Last I checked, no one went out looking for media players and said "I want one that has underlying frameworks."

That was actually a feature on the ReplayTV DVR I had circa 2004. Actually commercial skip was what got them sued out of existence by the networks and gave TiVO a virtual monopoly until the cable companies cut them off at the knees... http://www.avsforum.com/forum/...

You sound like an audiophile that think people can hear 96KHz/24bit audio. People don't even notice that cinema movies create less than 4K masters and blow them up on screens the size of a wall. And that most movies are shot in 24p because people want them to be. The biggest shortcoming of current screens is the contrast level and backlight bleeding, if you could get a screen that went from max HDR to perfect black that would be the biggest improvement. The second biggest improvement is color and there rec. 2020 is just huge compared to rec. 709, bigger than even reference monitors can provide. And despite stretching it for HDR the granularity of 10 bit color over 8 bit is also pretty huge. Oh yes and also the color volume, being able to do not only intense whiteness but also intense color.

Basically, if people saw a well-mastered 4K BluRay on a laser projector (which is as close as we get to a "perfect" image right now) I doubt anyone would care about 8K/12bit/120fps. The problems we have are far more mundane. And that goes doubly so for OTA broadcast, streaming or other bandwidth limited media. Personally I'm hoping for the "real" electroluminescent QLEDs to steal the show, not Samsung's latest quantum dot-enhanced LCDs but OLED-style perfect contrast with LED intensity and QD color accuracy. The first working early prototype was shown in May, at least a few more years out.

Japanese hipsters get their own dedicated power pole for $10K to $40K each to run their audio equipment.

http://www.avsforum.com/obsessive-japanese-audiophiles-install-private-power-poles/

Imagine how much the Monster audio hipster power pole must cost.

Japanese hipsters get their own dedicated power pole for $10K to $40K each to run their audio equipment.

http://www.avsforum.com/obsessive-japanese-audiophiles-install-private-power-poles/

> 10K is an easy limit for most according to the charts I saw.

I can only guess the charts you saw didn't account for age, and maybe you're counting the range that we can only barely hear if it's really loud. For the same detection rate you get for 1 watt at 2K, you might need 1000 watts at 10K.

I didn't do much research, I admit that freely. Here's one link with a graph, and here's another to tests.

The 10K test run on my system through crappy monitor speakers set at about 30% volume was easily heard rooms away in a quiet house. The 12K test could be heard, and the 14K+ annoyed my dogs. I guess that those monitor speakers aren't as crappy as I thought. :) So for me, at least, my drop off is somewhere around 12K. Then again, I've practiced hearing safety protection for years, even while mowing the yard, trying to compensate for a span of rather bad habits early on. Maybe it's working.

It's much easier and cheaper to make a good tweeter than to make a good woofer (or a good subwoofer). Try playing some deep bass or even some mid-bass and you will quickly determine whether you have crappy speakers. Just listen for the distortion.

> 10K is an easy limit for most according to the charts I saw.

I can only guess the charts you saw didn't account for age, and maybe you're counting the range that we can only barely hear if it's really loud. For the same detection rate you get for 1 watt at 2K, you might need 1000 watts at 10K.

I didn't do much research, I admit that freely. Here's one link with a graph, and here's another to tests.

The 10K test run on my system through crappy monitor speakers set at about 30% volume was easily heard rooms away in a quiet house. The 12K test could be heard, and the 14K+ annoyed my dogs. I guess that those monitor speakers aren't as crappy as I thought. :) So for me, at least, my drop off is somewhere around 12K. Then again, I've practiced hearing safety protection for years, even while mowing the yard, trying to compensate for a span of rather bad habits early on. Maybe it's working.

>> But isn't burn in still a major concern with current OLED? Also, don't the colors wear unevenly with what's being sold at the moment?

Apparently not.
http://www.avsforum.com/forum/...

Sony XBR X800D, 43 inches, 650 dollars, and pretty sweet. I bought one. One caveat is that even the latest HDMI spec doesn't allow 3840 x 2160 at ten bit with 4:4:4 chroma subsampling, it doesn't have the bandwidth. The panel is ten bit but for PC use I had to choose between outputting at ten bit or 4:4:4. Either way looks great, but I went with 4:4:4 (within nVidia's Control Panel. And the Sony itself needs set its HDMI to enhanced output to enable seeing the option for 4:4:4 chroma subsampling in the nVidia Control Panel). But the limitation doesn't feel like an issue for any content I watch. The other minor caveat is that its brightness limitations mean HDR won't be as spectacular with the effects that depend on lots of brightness. You need to spend more money on a bigger set to get that as well, it seems. Great review here: http://www.rtings.com/tv/revie... AVS members owners forum here: http://www.avsforum.com/forum/... I posted some of my impressions there.

As an audiophile I'm quite aware of adjusting the center channel independently, but thanks though. :-)

The problem is two-fold:

1. I also watch movies at a friends house and they only have 2 speakers -- the dialog is "blown out" more often then not. :-/ Since they aren't interested in a sound bar there are little options. There is only so much futzing around with the downmixing / sound modes one can do. :-(

2. Even on my own system I'm come across the occasional movies where someone screwed up the dialog channel. Tends to be action / foreign films the most for some reason. Go figure.

> at least not as well as my plasma.

Man after my own heart. =)

Digressing ... I honestly don't know what I'm going to do when my Panny TC-P60VT60 goes out. Hopefully OLED will come down from the stratosphere by then.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jo...

Back on topic, yup, for black levels Plasma kicks projectors.
* http://www.avsforum.com/forum/...

--
"When I die I hope my wife sells my speakers for what they're worth rather than what I told her I paid for them."

I will pledge never to give them another dime.

Enjoy your piece of shit Samesung equipment.

They can sound differently due to the way the device(s) provide the input and/or to the settings on the receiver (because yes, they are both digital).

A simple indication of things that can happen is provided in the second post here:
http://www.avsforum.com/forum/...

A proper test would have the input devices doing only bitstreaming of medium-bandwidth audio in a format supported by the receiver and the receiver applying no or exactly the same postprocessing (including gain, obviously) to the decoded streams.

• ref 1
• ref 2
• ref 3
• ref 4 related
• ref 5

Over-rated yeah. Horrible & Boring? It has been a while since I've seen it so could be. Surprised CinemaSins hasn't "reviewed" that one yet.

I'm an audiophile so I use it to test my sub placement & volume. The ship battle is a treat. :)
i.e.
http://www.avsforum.com/forum/...

> I'm claiming that nobody really cares about anything below about 100Hz.
> there is extremely limited material out there

Do you even understand what a spectrum waterfall graph is?? Gee, even timestamps are listed ...

* http://www.avsforum.com/t/7554...
* http://www.avsforum.com/t/1333...

Sound frequencies below 20 Hz is omni-directional -- in layman's terms that means you will feel it more then hear it.

Oh look at that, even modern movies such as Wall-E have "deep bass"

Basically you don't know what the hell you are talking about.

> I'm claiming that nobody really cares about anything below about 100Hz.
> there is extremely limited material out there

Do you even understand what a spectrum waterfall graph is?? Gee, even timestamps are listed ...

* http://www.avsforum.com/t/7554...
* http://www.avsforum.com/t/1333...

Sound frequencies below 20 Hz is omni-directional -- in layman's terms that means you will feel it more then hear it.

Oh look at that, even modern movies such as Wall-E have "deep bass"

Basically you don't know what the hell you are talking about.

> Most audio systems out there cannot reproduce much above 16Khz

Don't you mean 20 Hz ??

i.e. http://www.avsforum.com/t/8102...

Way back in the 80's, Popular Electronics published a series of articles that described an active crossover that split 150Hz (or so) off and sent it out a separate output to drive a sub-woofer. They also had two designs for a ported enclosure that used either a 18" or 22" JBL driver. The smaller of the two, which was as big as a coffee table, required 200W and would get you down to about 30Hz on it's own or with equalization you could get down to 20 Hz. The 22" driver design was about 50% bigger enclosure and it would get you down to 16Hz with equalization and about 400 Watts. Always dreamed of doing this and I kept the articles all these years. Now days, you cannot buy the drivers and active crossovers are really cheap so why build your own?

But who needs 20hz? That's more earthquake you feel than sound you hear. Most stereos are going to roll off the low end someplace above 60Hz. The size of the speaker enclosures and the power required start to get really large, really quick as you go much under 100Hz. To do 20 Hz properly is going to take a really large enclosure and a large speaker (something like 18" or bigger) and you will need quite a bit of power (300 Watts or so for 100 Wat stereo) to get a flat response from 100Hz down to 20Hz. But this is WAY below what most stereo systems can do.

But, I'm claiming that nobody really cares about anything below about 100Hz. There is very little material that you can find that uses much below 100Hz beyond action movies and some specialized recordings. (I have some of these recordings). Nobody has equipment capable of reproducing such low frequencies, so in order to avoid 60 Hz hum issues they just cut everything below about 100 in the studio. I'm also claiming that most material doesn't have much content above 16Kzh either, mainly because nobody can hear it and most stereo systems cannot reproduce it. Most recording studios just EQ away anything above 18Khz and below 100Hz just before they compress the life out of their recordings anyway, especially for any material like Country, Rock, Pop, Jazz (less so) that goes out over the radio. Classical is *sometimes* left alone, but in my experience the recordings are usually not done in studios and usually there are significant deficiencies in microphone selection and placement not to mention issues from the acoustics of the venue. My point being, that there is extremely limited material out there where anybody could tell the difference between 20-20Kz system and a 100-18Kz system and of that material, very little of it is anything you'd be willing to listen to in the first place.

> Most audio systems out there cannot reproduce much above 16Khz

Don't you mean 20 Hz ??

i.e.
http://www.avsforum.com/t/8102...

Allegations?
http://www.avsforum.com/t/1333...

There you have a forum thread with discussion of bass tracks in movies and if you bother to read it you will see that some movies have significant infrasound even down to at 2 HZ in rare cases.

Found that on the first page of my google search...

According to this article from 1991, they cost $1700-1900.

Assuming that they were introduced in 1991 (as opposed to "the 80s"), that would be ~$3000 in today's dollars. Stack them up against one of the ones here:
http://www.avsforum.com/t/8639...

Im not really one to argue amps (since I dont deal with them), but I would guess that theres a combination of confirmation bias, "grass is greener" / "good old days" thinking which selectively forgets issues had, and a failure to account for the substantial difference in today's dollar and the dollar 20-40 years ago. There is a lot more stuff available for a lot less money (laptops, amps, etc), which can lead people to thinking that "my $200 laptop died, therefore technology today sucks".

There is also a point to be made that today's tech has finer tolerances, and so can be less reliable; stone tablets last for absolute ages compared to harddrives, because their tolerances are so loose. Harddrive platters spin at 7200 RPM and (randomly googled fact) have ~2million bits/inch; stands to reason they will fail more and more easily than the stone tablet, but they are indisputably higher quality. Quality can be had (there are high end disk arrays which all but guarantee you will not have an outage, for example) but it costs money, and a lot of people dont want to spend it.

We need a VCR equivalent. Been looking for one for a while.
For all you young people, a VCR - Video Cassette Recorder - let us record live TV - unencrypted - onto tapes. I'm only half kidding about the education here.
We need a simple box that records OTA in 1080P onto a hard drive or USB stick. There are several out there, of various flavors. The key for searching for such is "converter box" with recording capabilities.
A PC with media software is not sufficient. We need a simple solution.

This might be a contender very soon:
http://www.avsforum.com/t/1500872/channel-master-cm-7500-2-tuner-ota-dvr-with-guide

So they basically bragged that they found the perfect pixel density @ 330 ppi... which is even worse.

Wrong. The pixel density beyond which it makes no difference varies according to typical viewing distance. It's around 300 dpi for a phone, as the typical viewing distance is around 10 inches. It would be considerably lower for a TV for example.

In reality, they sticked with that pixel density because they have very strict (pixel-based) design constraints for their platform.

Wrong. Retina displays also cover the Mac, and that has no fixed pixel counts for a display.

And here's a chart of HDTV systems, and based on viewing distance, when each of them reaches the point where there is no point.
http://cdn.avsforum.com/4/4c/900x900px-LL-4cd4431b_200ppdengleski.png

Because that's when this story first made the rounds. It was first mentioned on 8 October in the highly-regarded AVS Forums http://www.avsforum.com/t/1494093/panasonic-to-end-plasma-panel-production-by-april-2014

So tired of getting stale "news" here lately. If /. went dark tomorrow I think I'd miss it less than I'm going to miss Panny plasmas.

This is a great feature for people too stupid to just use the other HDMI input on their TV.

My TV only has one HDMI input - and my receiver has two. (Not everyone has whatever you have.)

Another thing people seem to be missing is the latency in the controls for the game. The more links you have in the chain, the greater the latency between what you press and what you see. While it may not be a huge issue for many games that don't require a great deal of timing precision, for those that do it's an utter nightmare to compensate for. I have a hacked PS3 with some emulators on it that is wired through my receiver then to the TV. In Super Metroid, doing the mock ball requires some pretty accurate timing and is near impossible on my setup. While if I play on a PC with a wired controller, it is much easier to perform. Even getting some accurately timed jumps (i.e. wall jumps) is hard to do via the PS3. I know that HDTV's have latency problems sometimes related to scaling of the signal (i.e. 480 -> 1080). When hooked directly to the TV, the lag is a little bit less, but due to signal processing in the receiver I get a little bit of added lag. I suspect there's some small amount of lag in the wireless controllers, particularly if you get a lot of noise from other things sending/receiving in similar bandwidths (i.e. bluetooth keyboard/mouse). I'd imagine the XBO will do the same thing, and have the same problems. Queue all the CoD kicking and screaming.

The only joke is how many people have drowned in the "OMG WIDESCREEN FLATPANEL HD" kool-aid that's set us back so far we're only now getting flatpanels with a vertical resolution equal to what a 10+ year old trinitron could do effortlessly. That and ever shorter and wider monitors, I see some modern laptops and it's like reading off a postage envelope.

No, you can buy huge 1920x1200 screens. Just quit being a cheapskate and looking at sub-$200 monitors. Good high end CRTs that didn't blur out at 1600x1200 cost plenty back in the days as well, and if anything, the sub $200 CRTs were never good at anything more than 1024x768 unless you like seeing blur.

The only reason we have "full HD" monitors for sub $200 is economies of scale - 1080p video processors and scalers are damned cheap because they take in every input imaginable (HDMI, DVI, VGA, component, composite, S-video) and output 1080p, so they're popular for monitors and TVs.

Video processors that can handle other resolutions aren't in such high demand, so they cost more. Likewise, good LCDs to pair them up with are harder to get as well (I expect driving a 1080p display is pretty much standard now, but any other resolution isn't).

Dell sells 1920x1200 monitors that are fairly decent and on sale for under $400. You wouldn't get the size, quality, weight or picture quality for $400 back in the day of CRTs.

My BenQ XL2420TX says you have no idea what you're talking about. 144hz refresh rate with a 1ms response time looks crisp no matter how much stuff is moving on the screen. Even my old POS Samsung SyncMaster LCD doesn't have any ghosting or blur that you speak of (60hz, 1ms refresh time). This seems like a problem with you just buying shitty monitors. If this was a few years back, then yes, you would have a point... but even the most fickle of users (CS 1.6 professionals) have recently moved off of CRT monitors to BenQ monitors for tournaments.

Actually, the problem isn't how fast you update the screen, it's how the motion blurring reduces resolution. There's something called Motion Resolution that details the apparent resolution of a screen when objects are in motion on it. Now, higher rates and shorter refresh times help (though there isn't a standard - some "240" monitors really are just 120hz or even 60hz. And the 1ms is "grey to grey", black to white is often quite a bit longer which his why they never quote it anymore).

Of course, whether or not he can see it or it's psychological, that's a different matter altogether.

Digital Television broadcasts on a different set of frequencies and requires a different style of antenna for optimum reception. Wavelengths are shorter so instead of a big huge V to catch the longer wavelength analog TV signals, you can use an array of smaller V-sections. Your old set of rabbit ears will still work, just like sticking a wire and some aluminum foil into the antenna jack would work (not optimized, but still conductive so still funcitonal), but you would get much better results with an antenna designed for DTV.

Hell, you can even make one out of a few coat hangers. I've made several of these for myself and friends and they work great. When the analog stations first switched off, we could barely get all of the regular stations with our rabbit ears, but with the coat-hanger antenna, we could even pick up duplicates of some (from another nearby town).

It's not like Google magically broke you jackass. Here is one page, and here is another. When reading that second one, remember what is discussed in the first. Also follow the links in the first article. The Government studies are harder to find, but do exist.

Sync is an issue with any control system that has no concept of the actual state of things. Crestron and friends can get around this by issuing commands over RS-232 or Ethernet and getting confirmation, or with infrared and current-draw or voltage detection, or in some cases just asking a component what it's doing.

Without that sort of feedback mechanism, it's always going to be somewhat a crapshoot. Especially if you have more than one controller laying around (turn everything on with the Harmony but switch off the projector with its remote? Now it's confused.)

It can be improved kind-of-cheaply by using IR repeaters (Xantech and many others), to ensure that no matter which rational direction the remote is pointed all components will see every command.

Putting a power toggle on the first page of the Device menu in the Harmony helps, too: If power get de-synced, it's just (say) Device -> TV -> Power, and done. And if the inputs are wrong somewhere, pushing the activity button again will always reset it. (This keeps you out of the stupid help system, which might be useful for a houseguest but always pisses off anyone with a clue.)

Regarding slow response with the Harmony, there's a few adjustments for that. I've had the problem, did steps similar to that in the link, and it works fine. Maybe not to the level of detail I needed with Super Mario, but plenty good enough for adjusting the sort of settings you describe (I also dink with the menus more than might be sensible) or futzing with a DVR.

Your Marantz remote sounds like an interesting thing, but there's another issue with it (aside from the poor user-interface for controlling switchers and stuff): When you want the new and shiny pre-pro/receiver/whatever, or the old one gives up, the interface that people are used to is going to change. My wife hates that, as do most wives. :)

*shrug*

I'm not trying to persuade you one way or another, I'm just trying to solve the problem of not having enough useful inputs without turning the user interface into a pile of hateful remotes. I've got a decent selection of different gear, but only one remote that's not packed away and nobody has a problem making it work.

Re: HDMI switchers. I have no specific recommendation because I've so far managed to avoid them, although I myself will need one for the next console I get (I'm out of HDMI inputs). At the consumer level, they're all Chinese and they're all built around the same handful of different chips, so there's a strong probability that given a selection of a dozen random units at a dozen different price points, many of them are going to behave identically.

For myself, I'm going start with Monoprice (and pay attention to reviews with the usual grain of salt that reading user reviews requires), and go from there: Their products are inexpensive, and generally do work exactly as advertised. If nothing else, they've got a great reputation for accepting returns if the device doesn't work as expected.

If you want (or are able) to spend real money, one absolutely cannot go wrong with anything that Extron makes. But, $$$, and there isn't any particular magic to switching HDMI (unlike high-resolution component or VGA): It either works well and follows the specification, or it does not.

You may already have a digital camera (still or camcorder)with video or hdmi out which you can plug into a TV or monitor. These have the advantage of zoom and autofocus and often have a power input for continuous use. It's steadier and less tiring to use a tripod or copy stand. For camcorders, see the thread at http://www.avsforum.com/t/1302280/low-cost-cam-with-live-hdmi-pass-through Another choice is to get some strong binocular loupe glasses from China via ebay. They come in a variety of strengths and you can examine or read by moving the material in front of you. They are cheap ($1-50) and portable. Some come with their own LED illuminators. Search for binocular loupe

Government studies on stereoscopic viewing shows that viewing artificially created 3D can lead to a loss of depth perception. I built 2 different 3D CAVE/powerwall systems at the DOD. Engineers were limited to 5 hours per week which was considered the safe exposure rate. Viewing generated 3D can be used in some cases to treat strabismus, but normal eyes it's known to cause strabismus (more easily termed, permanent lazy eye).

Of course Hollywood would never tell you about such dangers since it would hurt their bottom line. Here is a link of note, which is important to note " 1 + 2 = if you use stereo 3D routinely and intensively, you will develop strabismus, period. Government studies showed that damage is not always from "routine" and "intensive" viewing. 8 hours a week had a very high rate of eye damage which is why we limited Engineers to 5 hours.

My understanding was that all modern TVs have programming specifically to detect pulldown patterns and undo them.

Oppo stuff undoes 3:2 pulldown from DVD material and will play back a 24fps signal. It does make a noticeable difference (I tested on some LotR landscape pans; but even some of my sitcoms seem to be 24fps source, mangled to 60fps for DVD release). However, it really highlights bad edits, because if the 3:2 pulldown isn't perfect in a scene change there will be a single frame which is "torn" into a top half and a bottom half from the surrounding frames. I doubt that any modern TVs are actually undoing 3:2 pulldown without mucking around with interpolation (i.e. 1080i vs. 1080p), which causes its own similar artifacts.

As to references, just search for "120Hz 24fps 5:5 pulldown" and you'll find plenty of investigation on gearhead forums like avsforum. In fact, that link specifically discusses the 3:2 pulldown reversal into a 60fps interlaced stream, and those guys are better informed than I.

Seriously? Is this the kind of deeply technical questions that the diversified and experienced /. community is supposed to answer? Is this becoming Yahoo Answers?

And to the poster (because the first paragraph was to the editors), just take some time to type something into google and head over to:

• ilounge
• engadget:
  http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/26/ask-engadget-best-over-the-ear-headphones/
  http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/04/ask-engadget-best-passive-noise-cancelling-headphones/
  http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/31/ask-engadget-best-usb-headset-for-skype-calls-and-podcasting/
  http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/11/ask-engadget-best-non-gaming-wireless-headphones/
  http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/24/ask-engadget-best-non-ugly-noise-cancelling-bluetooth-headset/
  http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/01/ask-engadget-best-earbuds-for-outdoor-fitness-use/
• any audio forum

At least you will get more detailed answers and consistent comparisons. And I won't have to do the google typing for you.

The Sony HMZ-T1 is a little more expensive than this proposed project, it is available now, and with a few tweaks and mods (try this AVS forum) it is a fantastic VR headset. With mods it is very comfortable to wear for long periods of time and the OLED displays are high quality.

No, this is a classic slippery slope. In the UEFI version that supports Windows 9, only secure boot is supported. You can't turn it off, but you can still enter a key manually when installing an Untrusted Non-Microsoft OS (UNMOS). The key is 256 characters long, and looks like a ROT13-encoded Perl script.

UNMOS is not an acronym and "Untrusted Non-Microsoft OS" it not a technical term. In fact, the only hit for "Untrusted Non-Microsoft OS" on google is the original post on a forum that you ripped off to repost here;

Was using PS3 w/Media Centre (DLNA streaming app) on a PC.
Then I read up cinavia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1265114

Decided to convert my NAS
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=hp%20microserver&hl=en&meta= into a HTPC with a slimline video card (40$) and put XBMC on it (plus XBMC remote for Android, no IR, no bluetooth required)

Has been better than expected, XBMC came a long long long way since my Xbox 1.
Playback is smooth, UI is good, even installed MySQL on the little NAS and now the library can be accessed around the house easily with multiple copies of XBMC tied in to the main box.
Very good stuff.

most are h.264; second most common vc-1; least common is mpeg-2. bitrate (see: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1155731 ) usually doesn't matter too much if the source is good, as even the vc-1 encoded Domino still ranks at the top of the Blu-ray PQ thread. i can't wait for x264 to start hitting discs...

Being an HTPC, you would be able to configure this? I'm confused as to why an undesired conversion would take place, given that HTPCs tend to be custom built by the user.

You'd think this, but it isn't true. You can choose YCbCr from the video driver on some solutions, but testing shows what it is actually doing is converting from YCbCr to RGB for the framebuffer and then back to YCbCr for output! (See this thread for some additional information.) This, of course, is a lossy process since 8-bit quantization is used for all these values. There is no way to tell a HTPC to keep its dirty hands off your signal.

Or like this one for LGs.

Check out UnRAID here. It is open source and lets you add disks more easily while providing redundancy. You should also check out the HTPC forum on AVS Forums.

The guys at A-Tech Fabrication build to order fanless, fully passively cooled computers and cases. I just ordered one for myself and am super-excited. There’s a long thread at AVSForum about them too. I dunno what the people talking about how it is “impossible” to get a passively cooled computer are talking about—I’ve had one for years.

... you were looking at a $700 to $800 investment in that PS3.

When I bought my PS3, it was $350, which was within $50 (plus or minus, I forget) of reasonable Blu-Ray players. I don't know if this is still the case, but at one point in time the PS3 was the benchmark for disc load-times. I'm pretty sure my nostalgia glasses are working fine.

It happened right about when you purchased a plasma TV, right? There you go.

Really? In all of the research I did, I found that the worst latency came from LCD TVs, not plasmas. It tended to be due to image "enhancement" algorithms that are more popular with high-end LCDs than high-end plasmas. Check out this "official" plasma input lag thread. Those guys do some pretty serious tests.

You may get a more unvarnished opinion from this site.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/search.php?searchid=17645769

You complain about grain, yet look at the LotR Blu-Ray release - The "Noise reduction" was cranked up so high on that, every character and scene looks waxy and plasticy, and hair is smeared into a mess. And don't tell me it was the transfer, as there was a HD release on PPV Satellite that was MUCH better. http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1237167

If anyone is interested in more comparison shots you can go to AVS Forum. The user Xylon there posts comparisons between upconverted DVD and Blu Ray, often even comparison between releases in different regions of both of them.
Usually there is a clearly visible difference. There are of course a few bad apples. The "Traffic" HD-DVD actually was the standard definition DVD source upconverted and some of the early Blu Ray releases suffered from issues as well (overfiltered and MPEG2 compressed). They seem to have gotten the hang of it now and quality is clearly better in my opinion.

Microsoft has been trying to get into the media in the home position for 10+ years now and it has been a long string of minor temporary successes interspersed with epic fails. Media center PC - FAIL, epic FAIL. Why - just look at an original XP media center remote and the answer is there. It has Live TV and DVD on it. NO OPTION FOR RECORDED MEDIA. Yes, that is the way the media companies would like us to consume it. That is however a guaranteed market fail for the product. No wonder that a significant proportion of these are hooked up to MythTV and DIY media center boxes running Linux nowdays. Compared to that Apple remotes worked out of the box and they were designed to deliver what the customer wanted day one. In its early days (and for some people it is still the case) iTunes was more about organising pirated media collections and not buying more iStuff and it did that job brilliantly regardless of what the media corps say.

Do you even have a fucking clue as to what you are talking about?

Just because there isn't a button that says "OMG CLICK TO WATCH RECORDED TV", doesn't mean the function isn't there, right in your face, inside the 10 foot UI. Also, I wouldn't cite windows XP as all MS has done in the Media Center market. Go ahead, head on over to AVSforum's HTPC area ( http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f=26 ). The Audio Video Science forum is one of the most informational sites for all types of A/V setups. HTPCs are dominated by Windows 7 Media Center, not linux setups or apple devices. (you know, that thing that is like 5+ years more advanced than XP, lol).

Contrary to what you say, the majority of HTPC devices are [u]NOT[/u] using MythTV and linux. The majority are running W7MC, with the media browser pluggin. Go fanboy some more for apple bro.

Forget LCD - I'm sure you've heard of OLED. It will be better than CRT in most or every way.

However, have you heard of QLED (quantum dots)? It's been making the news recently, and promises again to be better than *even* OLED in every way that OLED could even remotely fall short, including better colour, much brighter, more energy efficient (even OLED requires colour filters), easily printable, better resolution, and even thinner. And it should obsolete all current lighting technologies too. See these links:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=19591482
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_dot_display
http://dvice.com/archives/2010/12/quantum-dot-led.php

When these things become available (or even when OLED does), I'm sure you'll be the first to throw (along with any incandescent, flourescent, or LED bulbs you happen to have) the CRT in the trash ;) .

Strange. I've seen frame by frame comparisons on another site that concluded that Comcast did that but Verizon's FiOS TV service was crystal clear. That was a few years ago, so perhaps Verizon is compressing things as well now.