In September, 2010, the Metropolitan Opera in New York premiered their new production of Wagner's four-opera epic, "Der Ring Des Nibelungen" -- composed over 26 years, between 1848 and 1874, and first performed as a complete "cycle" in 1876.
Five years in the making itself, this new, Met production featured the conceit of a single set for all four operas -- a set designed to reconfigure itself mechanically in real time, and enhanced with digitally produced projections which actually responded to the motions and voices of the singers! The first two operas ("Das Rheingold" and "Die Walküre") premiered in their 2010-2011 season. The last two operas ("Siegfried" and "Götterdämmerung") premiered in their 2011-2012 season. And the complete cycle of all 4 was presented in their 2012-2013 season.
The Met also does HD simulcasts of many of its live performances to movie theaters all across the country. This disc records the HD simulcast of their October 8, 2011, performance.
And it's a real treat!
Read moreCertain flaws in your Home Theater viewing are bound to take you out of the moment -- flaws just too annoying to ignore. And Audio out of sync with Video is certainly one of them!
We've all seen examples of poorly "dubbed" movies, where the lip-sync error is so humongous it's comical. But errors even more subtle will still leave you with the irritating feeling that something is just, OFF. And once that sync error is corrected, there's that Ahhh! moment as you settle in and realize this is finally RIGHT!
In this post we will talk about Lip Sync errors -- where they come from, and what you can do about them.
Read moreAll of the Digital Video you watch in your Home Theater is "compressed". ALL of it! Whether it comes off an optical disc, or read from a media file you play, or as a program you stream from an Internet service, or even as a program you watch from a local, on-air, Digital TV station. Compression reduces both the amount of space necessary to store the video, and -- often more important -- the data rate needed to transmit that video or to read it off of storage.
But too MUCH compression will damage picture quality in ways difficult to ignore! In this post I'll cover the basics of video compression, along with a case study of video compression as applied to SD-DVD movie discs -- where the sins of poorly implemented compression are rife! I'll end with some recommendations on what to look for when picking up an SD-DVD title to maximize your odds of getting great picture quality.
Read moreOne of the enduring mysteries of Home Theater is how to connect your gear together so that the audio and video you WANT to pass between devices will actually get there! It sometimes seems like every path is strewn with potholes.
Restrictions can be technical, historical, and even legal (content licensing prohibitions). In this post, I'll attempt to demystify the most common restrictions.
Read moreBy 1934, Jack Warner was badly in need of some class.
Oh, his distinctly blue-collar studio was cranking out detective films and other such low-brow stuff, but what he REALLY needed was a Prestige project which would show Warner Bros. could hold its head up with the big boys!
What followed is the stuff of Hollywood legend -- one which should probably bear the title, "The Comedy of Errors"!
Read moreFew things cause as much confusion among Home Theater enthusiasts as the myriad details surrounding Digital Video formats. It is typical to run into settings choices, for example, which come with no useful explanation, nor even advice as to when or why you might prefer one over another. It is also typical to run into non-intuitive limitations: You can't do THIS because you are also trying to do THAT!
In this post, I will attempt to survey the entire topic of Digital Video formats as applied to Home Theater systems. There's way too much material here to cover everything in one post, but I will try to show you how the pieces fit together, and introduce the jargon you will see repeatedly in future posts as I get into more details.
So if you've ever wondered just what, "HDMI 4K/24 YCbCr 4:2:2 12-bit HDR10 BT.2020 with HDCP 2.2" actually MEANS (and why the heck you'd need to KNOW that), this post is for you!
Read moreOne of the basic steps in setting up any Home Theater system is making sure all of your speakers, and your subwoofer(s), are matched in output volume. Although you could try doing this by ear, this is really something best done with the aid of an inexpensive measuring device called a Sound Pressure Level (SPL) Meter.
This post discusses how to use your SPL Meter correctly.
Read moreThe world we live in is inherently Analog. All the things we see and hear, for example, are the result of physical events which are fundamentally continuous in nature. Some portions of your Home Theater are also Analog. For example, your speakers are Analog devices, as are the audio power amps that drive them. And the electrical signals carried on the cabling between those amps and speakers are also Analog.
But modern PROCESSING of both audio and video is done Digitally. And the newest forms of storage and transmission of audio and video are also Digital. In this post we will explore the basics of Digital Audio, with particular emphasis on the LPCM and Bitstream audio formats.
Read moreEVERYONE interested in Home Theater should have a few Calibration Discs in their collection. This is true even if you intend to hire a professional to come in and set up your system for you. Professionals will bring tools and computer programs which are both expensive to buy and daunting to learn. But even though you can't fully match their professional results, you should STILL have calibration discs handy to confirm there are no silly setup errors in your system, and to check whether any problems you spot while playing real content are due to oddities in that content, as opposed to something you've overlooked in your system setup. Calibration Discs provide you with content of known "correctness" which you can use for this.
There are LOTS of different calibration discs out there at this point, and more likely to come out over the next year or so as UHD (4K) video becomes more mainstream. Some of them are pretty specialized. Some require you also have those professional tools mentioned above. Some are hard to find, or even out of print. The most sensitive test I know of to confirm that Speaker Distance Correction is happening properly, is found in the Avia Pro SD-DVD multi-disc set, which is long out of print. And even in that case, this particular test was included in an add-on disc to that set, which only appeared several years after the set first shipped! Try getting your hands on THAT one!
In this post I'm going to discuss two, generally useful Calibration Blu-ray Discs. And also, one specialized disc -- in this case an SACD disc -- to give you a flavor of what's out there if you go looking for such specialized, test content.
Read moreFor his 21st birthday in 1929, Carl Laemmle, Jr., received an unusual birthday gift. His Dad gave him Universal Studios.
The guy everyone THOUGHT was the heir apparent to Carl Laemmle, Sr., got relegated to doing B-grade pictures, as Junior jumped in with both feet and took complete control. And he knew precisely what he wanted to make; a short list which included "Dracula". Junior really got a kick out of horror tales.
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