As I walked through the hallways
of the Venetian on the final day of the show, I was drawn to the TAD room, as often
happens. TAD always puts on a great demo, and Andrew Jones, TAD’s director of
engineering, is an engaging fellow. This year he had a stereo-only demo of some excellent
material played back from a music server, including both high-resolution and standard
16-bit material. He also played back a track from a Tape Project open-reel tape of a Keith
Johnson recording from Reference Recordings. It was spectacular.
Andrew also explained that TAD has now become an entirely
separate division of Pioneer and is officially known as Technical Audio Devices
Laboratories. He also went on to explain that the company is now "serious" about
making inroads into the audiophile market, even though TAD has its roots in the pro
market. To that end, he showed a compact version of the TAD Reference speaker and a
prototype power amplifier. Usually when a speaker manufacturer decides to build
electronics, it sends off warning bells in my head. But if any company could do it, it
would be one like TAD.
Companies like TAD (with Pioneer’s backing), JBL with
the Project Everest DD66000 speaker system, and KEF’s Muon are a few examples of what
large speaker manufacturers can accomplish with their state-of-the-art design and
manufacturing facilities. They also have to have talented engineers who understand speaker
design and are passionate about music reproduction. When you speak with these engineers
(or sometimes teams of engineers), you not only get a sense of their technical
knowledge (which is way beyond mine), but also their passion for music. That
impresses me.
* *
*
Something that I noticed at this year’s CES is that
both mass-market products and even some high-end ones are more commonly employing Digital
Signal Processing (DSP) for room correction. The most recognizable brand of room
correction is by Audyssey and can be found in products as diverse as receivers from Onkyo,
Denon and NAD to speaker systems from Wisdom Audio and Phase Technology. Several of our
reviewers, including Wes Marshall, Doug Blackburn and Vince Hanada, use Audyssey digital
room correction in their systems and swear by it.
One thing that surprised me was Sherwood’s use of room
correction from Trinnov, a company that I had not heard of. They manufacture a $13,000
pro-based system, but Sherwood has incorporated "Trinnov Optimizer" room
correction into the $1800 R-975 receiver (shown above). Trinnov claims that their system
measures the audio signal in three dimensions and processes it so that the resulting
soundfield conforms to the ITU 5.1-channel speaker layout.
I have heard demos of digital room correction in the past
from TacT, Lyngdorf Audio, Behold and others. They have impressed me, but nothing like
what I heard today from Anthem. The D2 audio/video processor with ARC-1 (Anthem Room
Correction) and Paradigm Reference Signature speakers sounded incredible. I can’t get
Shakira out of my mind.
* *
*
I must admit that I was a little disappointed walking the
show floor at the Las Vegas Convention Center today. I was looking for new TVs and
although there were a few interesting developments, there was nothing groundbreaking.
Super-thin panels are in, and several manufacturers,
including Pioneer and Sharp, were showing prototypes that were less than an inch deep. In
fact, Pioneer’s plasma was only 9mm thick. That is slightly less than half an inch.
Impressive as that may be, unless the picture quality is also improved, thinness
doesn’t particularly interest me. However, Pioneer’s Extreme contrast technology
is promising. The current Kuro line of plasmas already has excellent black levels, but
Extreme contrast might make them as good or better than even the best CRTs ever were.
OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) technology also shows
potential, and Sony had a display with many different panels of varying sizes. The images
were certainly eye-catching. Sony even had a 30" prototype with 1080p resolution, but
widespread use of OLED technology is years away. Sony reportedly has an 11" model now
available, but it costs $2500.
Samsung had a 3840 x 2160 LCD that they touted as the
world’s largest "Ultra High Definition" LCD. Even more impressive was
Panasonic’s 150" plasma also with 4k resolution. I couldn’t help but wonder
if these products would ever make it to market. At least Panasonic’s current
103" 1080p plasma is a real product that you can order from your Panasonic
dealer -- if you have $70,000, that is.
* *
*
A few months ago, I thought that the high-def format war
was all but over. Blu-ray seemed to have the overwhelming edge in both hardware and
software sales. Then something happened. Paramount and Dreamworks announced that they were
going HD DVD, which meant that the number of new movie releases would then be split
roughly equally between the two formats. The race was on. Well, fast forward to last
Friday, when Warner, which had up until then been format neutral, releasing in both HD DVD
and Blu-ray, announced that they were going Blu-ray exclusively.
