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New Gear: Earthquake Sound Revamps MiniMe Sub and iQuake Speaker Dock

High-powered car and home audio specialists upgrade popular models with a few design tweaks.

By Michael Berk
Posted May 17, 2012

Applying lessons learned in the car audio arena, Earthquake Sound has been delivering high-powered, high-quality products in the active deskop stereo and 2.1 market for a suprisingly long time.

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Review: FiiO E10, HRT HeadStreamer, and NuForce uDAC-2SE USB DAC/Headphone Amplifiers

Three affordable combo units that aim to spruce up your computer audio experience

By Michael Berk
Posted May 16, 2012

A couple of weeks back we took a listen to a couple of DAC/headphone amplifier combo units from ADL and FiiO that did it all — covering your digital audio and headphone amplification needs at home and on the go — but you don't always need to do it all, do you? There are plenty of us who really just need better audio on the desktop. Luckily, you'll find that the market's rich these days with small, do-it-all USB devices meant to do just that — at surprisingly little cost.

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Review: Creative HN-900 Headphone

Noise-cancelling ’phones for just 99 bucks

By Brent Butterworth
Posted May 14, 2012

Thanks to Bose’s overwhelming success in the category, most of us now think of noise-cancelling headphones as products that cost about $300. I’m sure every other headphone company would like to thank Bose for that, even if none of them ever will. But there’s really no reason that a noise-cancelling headphone has to cost so much.

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Shootout at the Sony Corral

Sony pits its top LCD TV models against the competition.

By Al Griffin
Posted May 11, 2012

You hear plenty about Sony in the news these days. Reports usually cite the company’s latest staggering financial loss, followed by something on its most recent vow to get its house in order by cutting business interests it no longer deems profitable.

One biz that’s apparently dragging Sony down is LCD TV. In an effort to turn things around, the company recently sold its stake in a LCD panel manufacturing venture it owned jointly with Samsung. But even though Sony is no longer involved in manufacturing raw LCD panel components, it is still very much involved in selling TVs. The company also claims significant performance advantages over other LCD TV brands — and it isn’t afraid to demonstrate those advantages in a side-by-side shoot-out.

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News

New Format News: Dolby TrueHD with Advanced 96K Upsampling

It may seem like a gimmick, but actually...

By Geoffrey Morrison
Posted May 17, 2012

Announced today, Dolby has added a new trick to their TrueHD encoding. It allows studios and authoring houses a way to upconvert standard 48 kHz content (the sampling rate of most movies) to 96 kHz for Blu-ray.

At an event at Dolby headquarters in San Francisco, I got a chance to hear the results. Interestingly, it was quite... interesting.

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News

A 3D Audio Update from SRS

SRS extends its Multi-Dimensional Audio platform with an app

By Al Griffin
Posted May 16, 2012

SRS, a company best known for audio processing used to improve the sound of on-board TV speakers — and one that was recently acquired by movie sound bigwig DTS — has been steadily promoting its Multi-Dimensional Audio (MDA) concept over the past two years, demoing the audio creation/distribution platform to movie studios, music labels, and journalists alike. This spring saw the establishment of version 1.0 of the MDA spec, along with the release of MDA Creator, a plug-in designed for a range of popular audio workstations that enables sound mixers to store audio in the MDA format. Now, the company has added the MDA Director app to its list of new things for 2012.

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Entertainment

This Week in Blu-rays and Music, May 15, 2012

All the entertainment you'll need 'til next Tuesday

By Ken Korman and Brett Milano
Posted May 15, 2012

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Entertainment

Giveaway: Storm Corrosion

The long-awaited collaboration from Steven Wilson and Mikael Åkerfeldt is finally in our hands. And it should be in yours!

By Michael Berk
Posted May 11, 2012
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Like many of you, we at S+V have been looking forward for a long time now to Storm Corrosion, the collaborative project from surround master Steven Wilson and Opeth frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt. Well, the album is finally here, and it does not disappoint.

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Entertainment

Free to Play, Pay to Stay

An unsettling trend in online gaming

By Geoffrey Morrison
Posted May 11, 2012

I am not naive enough to think that the gaming industry’s primary desire is anything other than to make money. As an industry, they’re really good at it, making more than the movie and music industries combined.

The past year has seen an explosion of “Free to Play” (F2P) games that are, well, free to play. Lately, storied titles like Tribes have been reborn in this model. More titles in development aim directly at this new pricing strategy.

But is it good for games, and more importantly, is it good for gamers?

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News

New Gear: Bang & Olufsen Play Line Debut

B&O expands its consumer line beyond the Beolit boombox with dock and TV offerings.

By Michael Berk
Posted May 10, 2012

When Bang & Olufsen unvelied the Beolit 12 portable speaker at this year's CES, company VP Henrik Lorensen described it as the first entry in a new brand, aimed at courting a different kind of B&O customer — somebody younger, hipper, and probably unfamiliar with the B&O brand to begin with.

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News

New Gear: The TV Shield

Summer's on the way. Get your set suited up for the great outdoors.

By Michael Berk
Posted May 10, 2012
1

Looking to get your TV fix out of doors, but worried a bit about the elements, or perhaps the occasional errant baseball? The new TV Shield has your back. Well, really it's got you covered on all sides.

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This Week's Releases

This Week in Music, May 15, 2012

Santana gets back to the guitar, The Sugarman 3 get retro, My Bloody Valentine rereleases the EPs, and more!
This Week in Blu-rays, May 15, 2012

Revisiting John Malkovich in HD, facing wolves with Liam Neeson, returning to 1900 with Bertolucci, levitating with Chronicle, and more.