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DVD |
| Nothing has had a bigger impact on home theater more | |
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HDTV |
| After a slow, rocky start, high-definition TV is ready to move into your home more | |
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MP3 |
| The arrival of MP3 put the music of the world at everyone's fingertips more | |
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Whole-house A/V |
| It's never been easier to have music and movies in every room more | |
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Hard-Disk Recording |
| Hard drives broke free of PCs to forever change home entertainment more |
DVD
Nothing has had a bigger impact on home theater
Illustration by Jayme Thornton
Since the beginning of Sound & Vision, DVD has been the dominant audio/video technology, having a profound impact on practically every aspect of home entertainment over the past five years and making high-quality home theater affordable for the masses. The DVD revolution has driven manufacturers to come up with better video displays and changed forever the way we watch movies at home. Along with reviewing more than 125 DVD players, S&V has covered the emerging DVD culture, not only reporting on attitudes and preferences, but helping to shape them, too.
DVD’s excellent audio and video have led to some profound attitude shifts. Its picture quality exceeds that of a carefully produced live broadcast, which used to be the standard for home-video quality. Only HDTV can give you a better image than the one you get from a progressive-scan DVD player. And when people realized that DVD images can be enlarged without serious degradation, it suddenly became compelling to watch widescreen movies at home on a large display. This led to an explosion of big-screen TVs — the same kinds of sets we’ve featured in our test reports since Day One.
DVD’s high-quality images also created legions of more video-savvy, critical viewers. People you’d never think would be interested in the fine points of video are now concerned about things like the convergence of projector tubes, color accuracy, picture artifacts, plasma display burn-in, and projector-bulb burnout.
This heightened awareness of all things video can also be seen in the enthusiasm for DVD supplements. It used to be hard to imagine average folks watching documentaries on things like the restoration of The Adventures of Robin Hood. But we’ve now come to expect such “extras” as standard features on a DVD movie. Articles like “DVD’s Big Adventure” (February/March 2000) and “Extras! Extras!” (November 2000) helped spread the word about such bonus material.
DVD has also been the biggest influence on home audio gear throughout S&V’s existence, mainly because it offers a surround sound experience rivaling that in the best movie theaters. This possibility spurred many people to upgrade to digital surround sound by not only buying center and surround speakers (and, often, a subwoofer), but a digital receiver as well. And as our test reports have shown, these receivers supply an enormous bang for your home-electronics dollar. Thanks to DVD, the victory of surround sound is so complete that two-channel receivers and “plain” CD players have become niche components.
DVD also laid the groundwork for the newerfangled multichannel music formats, DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD. We’ve offered coverage of both from the start, with comprehensive introductions in February/March and July/August 2001 and reviews of some of the first players. In April 2001, we started a “Tracking Surround” page in the Music section devoted just to new DVD-A and SACD releases.
With my column “Bottomless Pits” (February/March 2001), S&V was the first consumer magazine to point out the importance of bass management for playing DVD-A and SACD releases on a home theater system. While such processing is standard for Dolby Digital and DTS soundtracks, it’s still not always available or correctly executed for either high-resolution audio format. It’s gratifying to see that this issue has since been taken up by our competitors.
You can thank DVD for transforming the typical home speaker system from a stereo pair to a suite of speakers, including a subwoofer. Before its arrival, subwoofers were used mostly by audio tweaks and bass freaks. Now it’s hard to find a surround system that doesn’t come with one.
The big thing in DVD right now is recorders — another area that we’ve covered from the beginning, with the first-ever reviews of models in all three rewritable formats. These machines were all pricey compared with the VHS recorders they’re meant to replace, but now you can buy a DVD recorder for less than $500 — a sure sign that VHS is on its way out.
The arrival of decks able to record on more than one type of disc has made things easier for people who are confused and intimidated by the incompatible formats. For instance, Sony’s RDR-GX7, reviewed this past October and winner of a Reviewer’s Choice Award, can handle both DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW discs. And the Toshiba D-R1 recorder reviewed in the February/March 2004 issue can record on DVD-R/RW and DVD-RAM discs. Companies are also becoming more adventurous with their designs, combining DVD and hard-disk recorders in one versatile package.
The next big thing in DVD will be high-definition players and recorders. Unfortunately, these are likely to appear in competing formats. High-def DVD has almost as much potential to transform home entertainment as its standard-definition predecessor — if the perennially paranoid movie studios will release high-def versions of movies on disc.
Before DVD was launched, I attended a press conference where Warner Bros. executives wondered how to create a “collectors’ market” for the new medium. Since rentals had always dominated the VHS-movie business, they weren’t convinced people would collect DVDs. But they soon discovered that once you produce the first few hundred copies, DVDs are actually cheaper to make than videocassettes. This savings led to many DVDs being sold for less than CDs — and a vast collectors’ market was born.
More than half the households in America own at least one DVD player — the fastest adoption of a home-entertainment product ever. This bodes well for the success of high-def DVDs, which could begin to appear late in 2005. Of course, we wouldn’t be surprised if the movie industry, fearful of piracy, limited releases to a trickle. But high-def movies eat up so much data that HD-DVDs would be very difficult to copy. That means nobody’s going to have to worry about high-def file swapping anytime soon. So bring it on: blue lasers, camera, action!
HDTV
After a slow, rocky start, high-definition TV is ready to move into your home
Let’s go back to fall 1998. As we prepared to launch the magazine, high-definition digital TV broadcasts were just starting to hit the airwaves. This happy convergence gave me a chance to review one of the first HDTVs: the 64-inch Philips 64PP9901, which cost ten grand, weighed 355 pounds, and just barely pulled in digital signals from the nearby CBS transmission tower, the only high-def programming source in town.
Things have changed plenty in five years. You can now get an HDTV for less than $2,000. Great-looking flat-panel plasma and LCD sets are actively chipping away at the cathode-ray tube’s 50-year-plus reign. And the number of HDTV programs on satellite, cable, and most of the major broadcast networks is growing steadily.
S&V has tracked HDTV every step of the way, charting the system’s progress with our “DTV Report Card” (December 1999 and February/March 2001) and “HDTV: The Year in Review” (February/March 2002 and 2003), reviewing the latest and greatest sets, and reporting on new developments in “Random Play.”
The first HDTV program we watched on that widescreen Philips set was a nail-biting Jets vs. Bills game that looked spectacularly detailed and crisp compared with regular TV (that is, when the picture didn’t freeze up or dissolve into a psychedelic pattern of pixels). Football once again grabbed center stage that autumn when ABC rolled out Monday Night Football in high-def along with 5.1-channel surround sound. Viewers watching MNF on their expensive new TVs complained that some shots were out of focus and that the audio stuttered and popped, but at least it was in high-def. The network’s broadcasts continued throughout the season, culminating with Super Bowl XXXIV in January 2000.
In the early days, even the people who lived near digital transmitters had reception problems. And few of the sets had digital tuners, so most had to be hooked up to an external box. Worse yet, even though most first-generation tuners cost more than two grand, they couldn’t always pull in digital broadcasts. Using a motorized rooftop antenna helped, but even then the picture suffered from glitches every few minutes. Aarggh!
The next generation of HDTV tuners was a lot better — and a lot cheaper, too. RCA’s DTC-100 DirecTV HDTV satellite receiver, which I tested along with RCA’s MM36110 HDTV monitor in January 2001, was the first tuner to break the $1,000 price barrier. And it received the HBO-HD channel on the DirecTV satellite service, which finally gave movie fans a steady stream of HDTV cinema (alas, with only Dolby Digital 2.0 sound). A short time later, the Dish Network added Showtime-HD, which broadcast some movies with a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack. Saving Private Ryan in high-def with full 5.1-channel audio looked and sounded just as good, if not better, than in it did at the movie theater.
But after gaining initial momentum, both ABC and NBC reduced the number of high-def programs in fall 2000, with ABC notably dropping Monday Night Football. This prompted then-FCC commissioner William Kennard to label them, along with HDTV holdout Fox, “spectrum squatters.”
The fragile, new high-def broadcasting bubble drifted until June 2001, when CBS began airing The Young and the Restless in high-definition. But things really got rolling the following February when NBC broadcast the Winter Olympics in high-def. With its lifelike picture and thrilling 5.1-channel sound, the joint NBC/HDNet coverage was the next best thing to being on the slopes in Utah according to Michael Antonoff, who went on-site for “HDTV at Large,” June 2002.
HDTV prices soon started their own downhill descent. Panasonic broke the $2,000 price barrier in the summer of 2001 with its PT-47WX49 monitor. Meanwhile, Mitsubishi introduced sets with FireWire connections, including the innovative WS-73909 that I reviewed in February/March 2002, which let you record off-air HDTV broadcasts to a D-VHS video recorder. Finally, high-def time-shifting had arrived!
The FCC’s timetable said that all commercial broadcast TV stations had to get their digital channel up and running by May 1, 2002. But as that day came and went, 70% of them hadn’t made the jump. That prompted the new FCC chairman, Michael Powell, to come up with a voluntary schedule for broadcasters and cable and satellite providers to work HDTV into their mix. His plan also suggested that digital tuners be built into new TVs. By August 2002, however, Powell’s suggestion had become an official FCC mandate.
Things began to move in 2002. Midyear, the National Cable Television Association announced that the nine largest cable operators — accounting for 85% of the country’s cable subscribers — planned to offer HDTV service by January 2003. Given that two-thirds of TV viewers in the U.S are connected to cable, the NCTA’s notice paved the way for HDTV to take off.
Around the time high-def cable channels appeared, viewers saw their digital TV options expand beyond huge tube-based projection TVs. Flat-panel plasma and LCD TVs weren’t new, but they had been so expensive few people could afford one. Then along came Gateway’s 42-inch GTW-P42M102 widescreen plasma monitor (reviewed in February/March 2003). While it offered only enhanced-definition resolution, its $3,000 price changed everyone’s notion that plasma was out of the reach of ordinary folks, and prices have declined ever since. So next time you’re in Sam’s Club, check out the plasma TVs — they’ll be in aisle four between the frozen food and the bulk paper towels.
Not many people had been thinking about the possibility of high-definition camcorders, but that changed with the arrival of JVC’s $3,500 GR-HD1 (reviewed in July/ August 2003). The technology behind the GR-HD1 has been proposed as a standard (tentative name: HDV) by a group that includes JVC, Canon, Sharp, and Sony, which means that your next camcorder might well be a high-def model.
With cable companies feverishly adding HDTV — a trend that we documented in “What’s on HDTV and Where to Get It” (June and October 2003) — you no longer have to rely on a rooftop antenna to get local digital broadcast channels. But what if you want to plug your cable directly into the back of the TV, like you did with your analog set? Panasonic and Hitachi rose to the challenge by introducing “cable-ready” HDTVs late in 2003.
Five years down the road, I’m still impressed by HDTV’s incredibly detailed picture and 5.1-channel sound. And radical new display technologies are on their way, like OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) — a thin-film display that makes current flat-panel TVs look quaint. An HDTV that unrolls in sheets like wallpaper? Now that’s something I’ve got to see.
MP3
The arrival of MP3 put the music of the world at everyone's fingertips
What a difference a day makes — let alone five years! In 1999, CD sales were strong, and the CD’s two worthy successors, DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD, were preparing to carry the disc legacy into the new millennium. Then, almost overnight, downloading, streaming, and file sharing changed the way millions of people obtain music, shaking up the entire relationship between the record labels and their customers, and forever changing the way music is sold. The convergence of the Web, MP3 coding, and peer-to-peer file-sharing programs like Napster and KaZaA will go down in history as an example of what happens when worlds collide. And S&V was there, witness to monumental change.
In April 1999, I wrote a column titled “Manifest Destiny” predicting the creation of a giant worldwide jukebox that would allow people to listen to any piece of music ever recorded by paying a buck or less. In the same issue, David Ranada tackled the more immediate problem of MP3 sound quality, concluding that the files can sound good but can also sound very bad. Would high-fidelity become a thing of the past?
By November, S&V was delving into the intricacies of downloading. We described the Madison Project, IBM’s prototype system to deliver CDs via downloading, and hazarded that CD downloading could be available by that Christmas. (It wasn’t.) Meanwhile, December’s “MP3 Revolution” noted that “MP3” had overtaken “sex” as the most popular search keyword on the Internet. More concretely, we pinpointed 99¢ per download as the magic price. In the same issue, we pitted five portable MP3 players against each other and concluded that “the revolution has just begun.”
In our futuristic January 2000 issue, we asked experts to consider what impact broadband access would have on entertainment in the home. They (correctly) predicted a world of flash memory, 500-gigabyte (GB) hard drives, online communities, and movies and TV shows on demand. In an accompanying article, I said that new technology would create “a golden age of audio.” While music lovers would probably agree with that assessment, the record labels might not.
My July/August column, entitled “The Killer App,” observed that “the little Napster app had about the same effect as a mile-wide asteroid smashing into midtown Manhattan.” I was wrong. The asteroid was actually the size of Wyoming. Napster was the tipping point, and even when litigation shut it down, peer-to-peer file sharing prospered. Programs like KaZaA and Grokster let music lovers find just about any song ever recorded and download it for free.
January 2001 found us testing a new breed of component that attempted to bridge the gap between PCs and stereos. For example, Dell’s Digital Audio Receiver played MP3 files stored on a PC’s hard drive, distributing them through a home network to your stereo system. Clearly, MP3 files had gained legitimacy and were moving beyond the realm of cheap PC speakers. In the April issue Dan Kumin reviewed the NAD C660 CD recorder/MP3 disc player, one of the first to play discs containing MP3 files. Today, MP3 playback is almost a standard feature on audio players. In November, Yamaha broke new ground with the CDR-HD1000, which played and recorded CDs and housed a 20-GB hard-disk drive for ripping, editing, and storing music. Another piece of the future — low-cost, large-capacity hard drives — had arrived.
The nefarious ways the record labels might use to copy-protect their music was the subject of Stephen Booth’s “Access Denied” (April 2002), which predicted that “issues raised by copy protection will undoubtedly become even thornier.” In May, Dan Kumin reviewed five digital audio servers that could swallow up entire music collections, concluding, “the digital audio genie has been let out of its optical-disc prison.”
By the time 2003 rolled around, it was clear that the old world of record stores, and of tape and disc players, was becoming less important. Today’s world is one of the Internet, KaZaA, MP3, WMA, iPods, iTunes, ripping, burning, and monster hard drives. In June, Jim Willcox asked the billion-dollar question, “Where have all the CDs gone?” Are slumping sales due to file sharing, uninspired music, less money to spend, or a combination of those factors? Choosing to blame it on file sharing, the record labels initiated lawsuits against music lovers.
Clearly, we’ve seen the end of one era and the beginning of a new one. Downloading is huge and will only get bigger. Whether it’s for free from Earth Station 5, $5 a month from Rhapsody, or 99¢ a song from iTunes, more and more listeners are logging on to get their music. Five years from now, you’ll be buying lots of music — and movies — online, and your collection will neatly reside on a hard disk. My guess would be about 100,000 stereo and multichannel songs on something the size of an iPod. The only question is, when will S&V get that small?
Whole-house A/V
It's never been easier to have music and movies in every room
The last five years have seen the emergence of a plethora of products designed to entertain the whole family throughout the entire house. But it’s only within the last couple of years that multiroom audio/video has moved toward the mainstream.
Multiroom audio has come a long way from the days of propping up a speaker on the window ledge so you could hear music in the back yard. In-wall and in-ceiling speakers have become staples for whole-house audio systems. We tested a Niles in-wall in our premiere issue, and since then we’ve reviewed many others as well as multiroom processors and amplifiers.
But even early on there were indications of the radically new directions whole-house systems would soon take. In that April issue, I evaluated Terk’s Leapfrog HomeNetwork system, which moved audio and video around the house over existing phone lines. And that November, we looked at Escient’s TuneBase 100 CD management system, which let you download CD title and track information as well as album covers for display on a TV — something that would soon become expected of any credible multiroom rig.
Our January 2000 issue promised the “The Home of Tomorrow . . . Is Here” and delivered on that by describing the products and services that would soon emerge to transform the home into an integrated entertainment system. And in July/August, Dan Kumin took a look at Bose’s Lifestyle 50 system. This four-zone setup, with an innovative radio-frequency (RF) touchscreen controller at its heart, showed that a multiroom audio system doesn’t have to be complex or professionally installed to be effective.
And then came the digital audio servers. Early models like the AudioRequest ARQ1 from ReQuest Multimedia (also July/August 2000) and the Compaq iPAQ (December 2001) introduced people to standalone components that stored massive amounts of music as compressed files on a hard-disk drive. Next-generation servers like the Hewlett-Packard, Imerge, SonicBlue, and ZapMedia components that Dan Kumin reviewed for “May We Serve You?” (May 2002) had bigger hard drives, made it easier to interact with the Internet, and took advantage of their Ethernet ports. But a new benchmark was set by the Escient FireBall (November 2002), which allowed you to link several FireBalls to create a sophisticated multiroom, multizone system.
Components that use the Ethernet computer-networking communications protocol will probably bring the biggest change in how we shuttle entertainment around the house. Consider Onkyo’s NC-500 Net-Tune receiver (reviewed in February/March 2003), which can link up to a home network and stream audio from a computer’s hard drive or access Internet radio. Or, better yet, break free of room-to-room cabling and go with a wireless (Wi-Fi) setup, like Yamaha’s MusicCAST system (September 2003), the first system designed specifically to send digital audio over a Wi-Fi network. But then came OmniFi’s Digital Media Streamer (November 2003), which uses Wi-Fi to send audio not only around your house but to your car as well.
With personal computers increasingly becoming sources of entertainment, Ethernet connections are popping up on more and more “ordinary” A/V components. Consider the Go-Video D2730 (September 2003) DVD player, which is one of the first players that can be integrated into an Ethernet network so you can stream content from your PC to your living room.
Many new homes come with “structured” wiring that includes Category-5 cabling, while older homes are being “retrofitted” with Cat-5 so the owners can take advantage of new entertainment technologies. With the aid of a receiver like Harman Kardon’s AVR 7200 (June 2003), this wiring can be used to distribute line-level audio signals to in-wall keypad amplifiers, creating an audio-distribution system.
But how does the prospect of a home network sit with all those people who feel lucky if they can get their clock radio alarms to work? That’s why custom installation has grown dramatically over the past five years. To bring readers up to speed on what installers have to offer, in 2001 we ran a series of articles called “Custom Installation Basics” that covered all aspects of working with a pro. And in the July/August 2003 issue, we inaugurated “The Custom Installer,” John Sciacca’s regular look at networking, multiroom audio and video, and other installation-related issues.
It bodes well that manufacturers aren’t just looking to make their products more custom-installer friendly — by including multiroom/multisource outputs on “normal” A/V receivers, for example — but are also looking to make such features easier for everyday people to use. We appear to be heading toward a world of products that will integrate seamlessly and automatically with each other once they’re plugged in and connected to the home’s entertainment network.
Hard-Disk Recording
Hard drives broke free of PCs to forever change home entertainment
If S&V had forecast five years ago that we’d soon be sliding entire music collections into our shirt pockets or watching more commercials at the movies than on our TV sets, you’d have called us crazy. But in just half a decade, spinning magnetic platters that were once confined to computers have created whole new categories of A/V components, and brand names like iPod and TiVo have become household words.
My interviews with the first users of video hard-disk recorders for “Tapeless VCRs” (May 1999) made it clear that the passive way we’d watched TV for 50 years was passé. These new recorders let you pause live broadcasts and skip commercials, making it possible to watch 60 Minutes in 45 (a phrase repeated by a TiVo owner to a defensive Mike Wallace a couple of years later). S&V’s debut year featured our first reviews of both ReplayTV (July/ August) and TiVo (September).
The audio hard-disk server was born in 2000. “It’s not every day that a first-of-a-kind product comes along,” I said in my report on the ReQuest Multimedia ARQ1 (July/ August). The familiar act of finding a CD and loading it into the player, then taking it out and putting it away when you’re done, just to go through the same drill every time you want to hear it, suddenly seemed as efficient as using a crank to start your car. Once a CD was ripped to the hard drive, all you had to do to play it was simply point the remote at the server or your TV screen, and the same could hold true for every song in your collection.
Meanwhile, portable servers were making their way onto belt clips. The coming showdown between flash-memory and hard-drive players was first highlighted in David Ranada’s “Two Paths to MP3: RCA’s Lyra and Remote Solution’s Personal Jukebox” (February/March 2000). With my review of Creative Labs’ Nomad Jukebox (December), the advantages of hard-disk storage over flash memory became clear. Hard drives offered storage at pennies per megabyte (MB) instead of flash memory’s dollars. (The prices for both types of memory have since plummeted, but the relative gap between them remains about the same.) This added up to hundreds of hours of music in a portable jukebox vs. an hour or two in a flash player.
The only way flash players could compete with the breakthrough size, usability, and snazzy design of Apple’s hard-drive iPod (“Multimedia Maven,” February/ March 2002) was by shrinking in size. That usually meant eliminating the memory-card slot and relying on embedded memory. There used to be five flash-card formats competing for your pocket tunes, but most cards are now used for digital photography.
Computers with built-in TV tuners and hard-drive recorders appeared in 2002, with Sony’s Vaio MX PC (reviewed in “The Cutting Edge,” April) setting the stage for remote-controlled PCs that also act as audio jukeboxes. The trend has since spread into offerings by about 40 computer makers. Microsoft, meanwhile, introduced the Xbox, the first gaming console with a hard drive (“The Cutting Edge,” May).
By the end of 2002, hard drives were popping up in all kinds of A/V gear. Our Reviewer’s Choice Awards for that year represent a kind of coming-out party for the hard drive, with six of the 20 winners sporting one.
The hard-drive hoopla provoked broadcasters to become hostile toward their newly empowered viewers. And SonicBlue, which owned ReplayTV from 2001 to 2003, drew most of their wrath. Maybe I struck a nerve when I said in my Reviewer’s Choice Awards writeup, “as the set-top recorder that automatically leapfrogs commercials, the ReplayTV 4000 gives you the most precious gift of all: up to 20 minutes back in every hour.”
A lawsuit by the networks and studios forced SonicBlue to sell ReplayTV, and its new owner, D&M Holdings, dropped the Commercial Advance feature that had so charmed users. You now have to reach for the remote and repeatedly press the 30-second Quick Skip button — a huge leap backwards in convenience.
Still, if the future of video hard-disk recorders is in doubt, don’t tell that to the satellite and cable companies. There are more of these recorders inside EchoStar’s Dish Network receivers and DirecTV’s TiVo receivers than anywhere else. And cable companies are rolling out set-top boxes with hard drives that let you pause and fast forward through shows and schedule recordings as easily as you change the channel.
The fastest-growing market for hard-disk drives isn’t computers but home-entertainment devices like video recorders, game consoles, and audio servers. The number of drives shipped in entertainment products is expected to more than triple over the next three years.
The impact of hard drives couldn’t be more dramatic. With servers handling music playback at home and portable players giving you tunes on the go, the CD has become mainly useful as a source of new music. And “prime time” is anachronistic when you can rely on your hard disk’s program guide rather than accept an 8 p.m. invitation from an ever more desperate network executive. It took five years, but the revolutions of hard drives are no longer judged in spins per second alone.