#1 bluetooth uses a slight offshoot of mpeg2 audio compression which gets worse because you are most likely recompressing something already compressed with mpeg and that makes things even worse. This is the strength of AptX, it is an audio compression designed to not get exponentially worse when dealing with mpeg compressed audio. THAT SAID! Anyone know what phone he is using? The GOLD phantom supports AptX, so if he uses a samsung/htc/lg phone he would have been using AptX.

#2 speaker construction, it is an overblown Flip3 with radiators on the side. The radiators are designed to capture the back pressure of speakers and convert it into more audible sound waves, very good at saving the low frequencies and directing them back at the listener. The problem is it is a secondary uncontrolled speaker. This means your sound balance can go out of wack. Perfect for a $79 portable speaker, not ideal for a $3000 home theater setup. Also the speaker appears to be..mono? so you need 2 of them for stereo?

Yea, sorry, you can buy speakers that are not much bigger than this, hell you can buy a SET of front facing speakers and a good sub for $3000 and do better.

Excellent film, and I'm really looking forward to the video release. The theater where I saw it had their sound system setup such that all I could hear most of the time was the low and high frequency bands of the overly (IMO) frantic score.

This is one of three films I've bothered to see in a theater in the last ten years, and the experience is actually worse than watching it at home on my home theater setup which is not really anything special.

Really? That doesn't say much for your imagination. I'll try to help.

1. You don't have a gaming PC
2. You want to play in on your home theater from your easy chair
3. You prefer a controller to a keyboard and mouse
4. You want to play on your 60' plasma and 1080p is good enough.

I could think of more but hopefully that helps.

Honestly , I have a gaming rig but my GTX560ti is about obsolete and the last time I priced new cards the crypto-currency miners had driven up the prices. If I don't buy a nice card before this releases I will enjoy the hell out of this game on PS4. If it has a good multiplayer I'll play it on PS4 regardless.


PC master-race...sheesh.

I like the idea of a touch pad on the controller that isn't a gimmick (i.e. wiiu controller, which as of now can only use one touch screen).

If I could toss all my home theater crap in a closet so I never have to see it again, I would. (if I didn't have to fill my closet with snowgear I would have done this.) But I look at a spending $600- $800 on a console as crazy. If I'm going to buy something I need the games, better cords, more controllers, some memory card i won't use, more games, strat guides, etc.. Gosh that is expensive, who does that?!

Then I look to my "new" computer which it will be used to surf here and some games --that's it. It currently sits in boxes. The new box is halfway built, still lacking a mobo/ram/psu and I have about $800 invested in it. Probably going to dump easily another 400 to 500 in it, but that okay in my messed-up-I-need-this-to-live-mind.

because that is sane.

Remote controls are for wimps. I use a keyboard and mouse. I am typing this on my TV right now. That's right, HTPC, Home Theater PC. 52" widescreen HDTV, and all the content I can stream or download. Quality is about DVD level if you get the 350MB per 45 min episode versions. Most movies you can find at 720p, and some even full 1080p, though that's mostly a waste of time and disk space.

Discs, tapes, vinyl... it's all passé.

Lol thats awesome but you can get a fantastic home theater setup for much.. much less.

For example, over the fall I redid my home theater setup for about $3500, that includes.

Samsung LN52A650 - perhaps the best mid-high range LCD tv's in 08. Got mine for a bit over $2100. The picture blows anything I've ever seen on a TV away, no matter the model or the price. Call me biased (it is my TV of choice) but next to some of the LCDs my friends have.. they all now want one lol.

Pioneer 1018AH Receiver - Simply amazing, this thing can hit +80db. Thats no '130db $1m powerhouse but for $300 it's stunning.

Polk Audio RM6880 5.1 speakers - I have frankly never heard anything better outside a $3000 Klipsh setup. Pricetag - $900

Samsung PD1500 blu-ray player - Mid-end but I felt no need to go better. Cost me around $150.

I tell you there isn't a single person in my entire neighborhood who hasn't stopped over to experience the setup and every last one had their mind blown. Just at 0db you cant hear yourself scream. I typically play movies at -20db and thats plenty loud enough.

So yea, you don't need a $1m setup for great home theater, course I'm sure it would sound simply amazing.

Buying HDTVs is confusing especially since both commentators and people often throw marketing jargon and necessities at you that you really don't need. Most important is to see them set up in shop and compare and contrast, most places usually loop the same kind of content over all screens so you can quickly see what is good and what is not for your eye.

I would recommend a Plasma over and LCD, I own an LCD but I watch movies at my buddies place and he has a Viera Plasma that gives a much better picture and it looks less like a PC display which is what I feel with my LCD. Plasmas now offer the same brightness as LCDs, the Viera sits in a living room that has no curtains on the 6th floor in Kuwait. Sunlight has never been a problem. But this is neither here or there, anything you will buy will be good. Unless you buy something called Wansa or Chanachong or Leakwong (Lots of unheard of chinese brands in Kuwait).

Don't bother with Full HD or HD TV Ready, all that means is whether or not you will get 720p or 1080p. Now people will tell you that you MUST have 1080p, but that's really a false economy, as that increase in quality is marginal over increase in price. Almost 90% of HD content right now is 720p, and it's more then enough. P means progressive as in the whole picture is rendered at the same time, essentially.

Don't bother with 120Hz, it's all marketing jargon. It doesn't make that big of a difference unless you watch an ungodly amount of sports. But even then I will bet you hard cash to convince me there is a tangible difference from 10 meters away.

You must ideally look for a combo deal that will get you the TV and a home theater system at the same time, but be sure that the home theater has HDMI out (best TV quality), several RCA red/white audio inputs (connecting other audio) and a Optical In (future proof).

What you are trying to achieve is have all video separately to the TV via HDMI or composite connections and then route all the audio routed to your home theater. This will utilize both systems fully. I hate seeing systems when they have the DVD home theater but the satelliate audio is only from the TV, its just retarded.

For streaming content you should really look into the Xbox 360, mostly because it's idiot proof and every easy to setup. You plug it to your TV, then plug the Ethernet cable and you are pretty much set. If you want to watch Blu-rays you could get a PS3, as it is far cheaper then a standalone Bluray player. But its totally atrocious and much more fiddly feeling then the Xbox 360. Plus your son is bound to love the games on the 360 more then the PS3.

If you download alot of content from the Internet its fairly easy to set up a streaming TV server from a PC to PS3/Xbox360 using Tversity, and its also fairly easy to set up. I have done this several times, however it is also fiddly if something goes wrong and it won't really let you play MKV movies unless you do transcoding to a lower format that can be streamed from PC to TV, as real time conversion is a bitch.

Personally I have a Sony Bravia with the Sony home theater system, I use a Western Digital HD TV player to play all kinds of shit I download. Its a small unit that is really cheap, it plays almost all the current video formats as well as HD Blu-ray rips encoded in X264. You would need a separate USB drive that you hook up content to, but those are cheap and allow you to expand storage however much you want (think 500gb USB drive for family movies, 8Gb flash disk for kinky Cambodian sweat shop porn). It has HDMI, RCA and optical connections. It's only fault is that it doesn't do digital to stereo sound conversions, so you must have a optical in on your sound system to enjoy DTS streams, or your files will just have no sound.

I hope this helped.

same principles apply to home theaters you are dealing with the same problems and challanges.

How about home theaters?

Just do what I do:

Ditch the cable TV, get a DVI-HDMI cable, hook your computer to the TV and watch all your tv shows online. like, four commercials to an episode and you can watch them when it's convenient for you.

I picked mine up for 15 or $20, and it works great. Then all you gotta do is pipe your sound through your TV/home theater receiver with a cable like this.

MTM is the production company. Remember the MGM style logo, but instead of a roaring lion, it had a mewing kitty? I always liked that, as you might imagine. From the all-knowing god of the internet Wikipedia...

"Moore married Grant Tinker in 1962, and in 1970 they formed the television production company MTM Enterprises, which created and produced the company's first television series, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. MTM Enterprises would later produce popular American sitcoms and drama television series such as Rhoda and Phyllis (both spin-offs from The Mary Tyler Moore Show), The Bob Newhart Show, WKRP in Cincinnati, Hill Street Blues, and Newhart. Moore and Tinker divorced in 1979."

On a side note, I once installed a custom home theater setup in her apartment in NYC. I never met her but it was a nice place. I had to put speakers in her enormous walk-in closet.

In reply to this comment by therealblankman:
Regarding your recent WKRP posting... Mary Tyler Moore? What's the connection?

I skimmed the whole thread, so I may have missed it if someone did mention this. But it seems to me the most salient factor is what a person does with the file after they have downloaded or ripped it. Compare the following two scenarios:

1. You have a netflix subscription, and rip every dvd you get so you can watch it at your leisure. You delete the files after watching them (so your hd doesn't explode).
   
   
2. You shelled out $25 to buy a movie, then lend it around to all of your friends to watch. (Or maybe just invite several dozen friends over to watch it in your home theater.)

Eh, sorry, but he's got a point. You can't be drawn into a movie if you're watching it on a portable device. You need a nice, comfortable seat in a dark or dim room with no sounds but that of the movie. Maybe the iPhone could do it then, certainly not as well as a home theater would, but I think he is referring to the fact that the vast majority of movies watched on iPhones are in loud, crowded environments. I would never watch anything but a non-serious movie on an iPhone, and it couldn't be the first time at that.

I wanted to thank you for posting your comment about the loudness wars. It cut through the crap and made a lot of sense. I was upset when I first saw the vid, as I didn't know such remastering was done. I do see how some rock albums, like greenday, wouldn't suffer much from having a brickwall of sound.

One thing, though: given a more ideal audio listening situation (a decent home theater system or monitors, instead of a portable CD player or walkman radio), wouldn't the song always be better off with less normalization and processing? In terms of releasing a song to consumer CD's, is normalization and all that really just meant to compensate for poor sound systems, and improve SNR?

Thank you!
-Ryan

In reply to your comment:
“To Add my .02 worth:

I'm a professional Mastering Engineer, this is the most asked question I get these days from people who notice such things. They usually ask how I stand on the idea of all this, and I usually say that it has its place. The last Green Day Album would be a perfect example of an album that having a "brickwall" or "2x4" waveform is fine, but put that same kind compression on re-mastered CSN or Grateful Dead and we have a problem.

I was saying just today at lunch when this question was raised that it's a shame that more of today's young engineers haven't had to deal with analogue tape. Tape was on it's way out as I got my start in the biz, but at my first job the fellas there MADE me work in analogue to get used to the care that it takes when it comes to levels and compression. Much like learning to draft, you have to learn with paper and pencil first to get a "feel" for it.

Great vid! Thanks for sifting it.”

Looks pretty good, but I've had a few too many experiences having to configure Linux systems by editing text files. On the other hand, virtually none of my existing home theater equipment - my HD card, my NTSC tuner/S-Video input card - are "Windows MCE compatible". Hopefully, this uses the dScaler software, which does a far, far better job of scaling low resolution source. Hey, I might as well put it on...it's not like it costs anything.