Expertise

Unbelievably, in the distant past, primitive humans had to get up and walk across the room to change channels on their TVs. Then they invented fire - and remote controls. Today, languishing in our high-tech La-Z-Boy recliners, we wonder how our ancestors ever survived. From our sedentary positions, we also wonder why we seem to gain an extra pound every weekend.

The steady progression of compressed digital audio into all sorts of places (do you really need to listen to Mozart on a PDA?) is raising all sorts of issues. But none is more important to readers of Sound & Vision than the ability of the codecs - the encode/decode software - to faithfully reproduce music after compressing CD tracks to file sizes that can be easily downloaded or stored.

Compared with the "in the lab" box for one of our test reports on, say, an A/V receiver, the lab data for a TV review may seem skimpy. While there aren't a lot of numbers, the ones we do generate can give you a pretty good idea of what to expect from the set - particularly its color reproduction, which is arguably the most important aspect of a TV's performance.

There once was a time when audio/video components didn't have USB or Ethernet ports. When "kilobits per second" was not a hi-fi term. When a kid who stumbled over a stack of LPs in a dumpster actually knew what they were.