Sound and Vision Magazine

I have a confession to make: I've been a woofer wuss for most of my career as an audio journalist. When I started 21 years ago, there weren't many good subwoofers, and the little ones were usually less bad than the big ones, so I stuck mostly with smaller subs for my personal systems.

Do you trust your ears? I don’t. By that I mean I don’t trust my ears. Frankly, though, I don’t trust anybody’s. I’ve heard laymen enthuse about systems that had little more to offer than a few notes of booming bass. I’ve heard audio veterans trash impeccably engineered speakers — and praise speakers that showed glaring technical flaws.

British director Christopher Nolan wants to mess with your head. Memento, the film that put him on the map, moved backward in time to disorient viewers and subvert conventional storytelling. Ten years later, Inception feels like a follow-up, even though Nolan made movies like Batman Begins and The Dark Knight in the interim.