Sound and Vision Magazine

If I were forced to choose between the $20K worth of audio test gear I own or the demo CD that cost me probably 20 cents to make, I’d take the latter without hesitation. Test gear is great for telling me how well an audio product is engineered. But when I want to find out what an audio product does — i.e., how a listener will perceive its sound — the demo CD is a much better tool.

There’s a coffee cup on the remote, an icon unmistakably a cup and saucer. Maybe it’s tea. It’s the largest button. It’s backlit. It might be taunting me.

So begins my time with the Epson MegaPlex MG-850HD Projector, a plucky little PJ that makes me question the logic of every flat panel in existence.

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.

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?