polls

Greetings fellow B6 owners! I wanted to get a general consensus from everyone on their current thoughts on their B6’s, especially if you are on the latest firmware. I never update my B6 after firmware 4.x.x (forget the exact version I am on, but it was the one before HDR game mode got darker?)...

When choosing a new 4K TV, many shoppers establish a budget and then either set out to buy the best TV of a particular size that they can get for their budget, or the largest TV they can get for their money. There are other criteria used to make purchases, such as brand preference, aesthetics...

One of the news items in my inbox today was an article on Deadline.com that caught my eye. In the article, legendary director Steven Spielberg is quoted as saying that original movies produced by streaming services such as Netflix should not be eligible for Academy Awards. Spielberg...

2017 is the year of HDR in the land of TVs. High dynamic range offers viewers brighter highlights, more shadow detail, and richer colors. Currently, there are two flavors of HDR used to deliver content to consumers: HDR10 and Dolby Vision. Whereas HDR10 is the de facto standard for HDR—it...

The cost per diagonal inch of a 4K TV has dropped significantly in recent years while screen sizes have steadily increased. When it comes to impactful viewing experiences, screen dimensions are as crucial a factor as any other feature or picture quality parameter. Yes it's a cliche, but size...

This past Friday—April 7, 2017—I had the pleasure and honor of being a guest of Klipsch Audio at the 2017 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction, held at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. A significant portion of the four-hour event involved performances by the inductees including Pearl Jam, Yes...

Last week I attended a press event at Samsung's QA lab in Pine Brook, NJ. One of the presentations was about QLED TV, an acronym that Samsung says is a product category—like OLED—and not merely a marketing term. Speaking to that point, the company explicitly noted that other manufacturers...

While most people like to listen to music, where and how they consume it varies wildly. For portable headphones users, the act of listening is personal and serves as a soundtrack to whatever they do. Hi-Fi fanatics do their listening with full-sized systems, often enjoy the company of...

The 89th Academy Awards will be presented this Sunday, February 26, 2017, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, CA, and broadcast on ABC in the US starting at 7 PM Eastern/4 PM Pacific. By tradition, the last Oscar of the evening is awarded for Best Picture, for which there are nine nominees this...

For nine decades, 24 frames per second survived as the standard frame rate for motion pictures. Except for a few notable exceptions such as The Hobbit and Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, movies presented in commercial cinemas in high frame rate (HFR) simply don't exist. However, viewers at home...

Back in December 2014, AVS Forum editor Scott Wilkinson posted a poll asking "Have you installed Dolby Atmos?" At the time, 18.5% of voters said they installed speakers in their ceiling while Atmos-enabled speakers and add-on modules each commanded 2.5% of the vote. In that poll, half of...

The demise of mainstream 3D for TV is official thanks to Sony and LG ending support for the format that Samsung and Visio had already abandoned. Now we've got 4K UHD HDR TV, with its acronymic promise of an enhanced viewing experience resulting from the combination of ultra-high resolution, rich...

Even though it's 2016 and Americans have tons of alternative ways to consume media, from tablets to phones to laptops to projectors, according to this New York Times article , typical adults in the US spend an astonishing five hours per day watching television. "Those are some of the...

Prices of big-screen TVs are at unprecedented lows. For example, Vizio's parent company, LeEco,  recently announced a $5000 85" TV that give you UHD resolution plus HDR10, Dolby Vision, and 448 local dimming zones! Until recently, it would've been easy to dismiss TVs is incapable of competing...

HDR, or high dynamic range, as applied to TVs, is a catch-all term that refers to a combination of display technologies and content that make it possible for TVs to render scenes that look very realistic as compared to SDR (standard dynamic range) displays and content. What differentiates HDR...

Conventional wisdom says no, but many AVS members claim to see the increased detail of UHD at distances more suited to HD. What say you? Human visual acuity is limited; those with normal vision can generally distinguish details that subtend an angle of about 1 arc-minute, or 1/60 of a degree...

This question might seem to be asking you to choose which element you'd do without if you had to, but it's a bit more subtle than that. A few weeks ago on the Home Theater Geeks podcast , Mark Henninger and I answered questions from AVS Forum members and the live chat room. One question from...

Downloading music provides several advantages over streaming for those who care about audio quality. But which source is your favorite? Streaming music  is tremendously popular, but discerning audiophiles usually prefer to download music, especially uncompressed or losslessly compressed...

Digital recordings are far more prevalent than analog, but the older format continues to hang on with audiophile fans. Are you among them? These days, analog music recordings are available mostly on vinyl LPs, but believe it or not, cassettes are still around, with over 200,000 commercial...

Music is available on physical media and online in the form of streaming and downloading. Which delivery method do you prefer, and why? Music lovers have more options than ever for how and where to get their tunes. There are optical discs like CDs, SACDs, and DVD-Audio discs, though the...