David Ranada

International CES - Inside the Chassis of CES

By David Ranada
Posted January 11, 2002

Panasonic SA-XR10 Keeping it Real To me so far -- and I've only seen a small fraction of the exhibits -- this year's Consumer Electronics Show has been one mainly of trends and imminent breakthroughs.

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High-Def Discs and Tapes

Wild Blue Yonder

By David Ranada
Posted April 3, 2002

Okay, I know I shouldn't gloat. But I told you so. In a keynote speech at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) annual convention a year ago, I warned that if the broadcast and cable industries didn't get their act together when it came to putting high-definition signals out there in a big way, high-def programming would be provided by other means.

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Facing the Codec Challenge

The latest versions of Windows Media Audio and RealAudio go head to head with MP3

By David Ranada
Posted June 10, 2002

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.

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Microsoft Goes High-End

Microsoft's technology provides serious multichannel competition for SACD and DVD-Audio.

By David Ranada
Posted October 22, 2002

As I write these words, right around the corner from Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and his pals James Cameron, Peter Gabriel, Beatles' producer Sir George Martin, and LL Cool J-Microsoft calls him "a major music artist and film actor"-introduced with typical extravagance the clumsily named Windows Media 9 Series, the technologies formerly c

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A Hard Day's Mix

Miramax's soundtrack tampering has turned a classic into a series of music videos.

By David Ranada
Posted December 3, 2002

Within seconds of firing up Miramax's DVD release of the classic Beatles movie A Hard Day's Night, I knew that the Fab Four had been deep-sixed by the new set's producers. The image quality is excellent-the movie appears for the first time in a widescreen (1.66:1) video transfer-but the music is another story.

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Panasonic DMR-E20 DVD-R/RAM Deck

Recordable DVD gets real

By David Ranada
Posted October 4, 2001

Less than a year after I reviewed Panasonic's DMR-E10 DVD-RAM recorder in the December 2000 issue, here I am reviewing a follow-up model that, as we've become accustomed in things electronic, has more useful features, equivalent or better performance, and a much smaller price tag - $1,500 instead of $4,000! The drop to a far more realistic price is tre mendous prog ress all by itself.

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Opening Moves

Is there a Grand Master among the new DVD recorders from Panasonic, Philips, and Pioneer?

By David Ranada
Posted January 22, 2002

The players are in position, and the pieces are now on the board. But this is not a chess game, and the stakes are even higher than in the richest of Grand Master tournaments. This is the beginning of another video-recorder format war, but unlike the VHS vs. Beta conflict of the late 1970s and early '80s, there are three competing formats.

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The Cutting Edge: Sony MXS10 Vaio PC

Sony’s New Vaio PC Does It All

By David Ranada
Posted April 2, 2002

At $2,800, the least expensive Vaio PC in Sony's MX desktop line doesn't seem like much of a bargain these days, even for a 1.7-GHz, Pentium 4 with an 80-gigabyte (GB) hard drive, 512 megabytes (MB) of memory, the exciting "home" version of Windows XP, and two better-than-average speakers (the 15-inch Sony LCD monitor shown is $600 extra).

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Pioneer Elite DV-47A DVD/SACD Combi Player

By David Ranada
Posted April 19, 2002

Wouldn't it be great if you could just go out and buy the surround sound music titles you're interested in without having to worry about whether they're on DVD-Audio or Super Audio CD (SACD)?

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Big-League Receivers

Power hitters from Denon, Integra, and Yamaha promise to take your A/V system to the majors.

By David Ranada
Posted July 22, 2002

Photos by Tony Cordoza

There are high-priced major-league baseball players (is that redundant?), and then there are the Mark McGuires and Sammy Sosas - players whose abilities and accomplishments leave even their overpaid teammates in awe. The same holds true as you approach the stratospheric reaches of high-end A/V receivers.

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