Apr
18
Power Conditioners and Surge Protectors
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Firstly know that power conditioners don’t necessarily protect against surges and most surge protectors don’t “condition” power. Those aren’t necessarily bad things (as far as I’m concerned) because as I’ll explain I’m not a proponent of one of the two devices. Surge protectors are a vital, necessary part of protecting any home theater but power conditioners have to be judged on a case by case basis.
In a nutshell, surge protectors are used to (you guessed it) protect your system against power surges. Power conditioners are intended to “condition” your homes AC power before it reaches your gear, under the guise of improving or enhancing the audio and or video performance of your system.
Years ago while working in a high-end audio boutique, we received a power conditioner from a well know vendor for evaluation. This particular conditioner was intended to “clean up” video noise, and while we could indeed see a small improvement in clarity with our display plugged into the device, the audio we were hearing through the surround system, also plugged into the device, sounded noticeably worse.
I’m sure the inferior sound was due to current limiting but my point is, unless you want to have three or four of these devices behind your equipment rack, all doing slightly different jobs with slightly different levels of performance, my recommendation is to stick to surge protection and spend the difference on better gear.
Apr
5
Bass Shakers
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Bass Shakers, Butt Kickers, Tactile Transducers or whatever you happen to call them; were all the rage a few years ago and in some circles they’re still quite popular, but perhaps not quite as popular as many would have expected. I have a few opinions (shocker I know) on why Bass Shakers might have dipped in popularity.
Number one no matter what you happen to think of Tactile Transducers the lack of soundtracks with discrete, dedicated motion channels have slowed the adoption rate of the entire genera. I suppose I should say readily available dedicated channels. D-Box has been quite active with their system of late but sadly a “universal” motion effects channel never seemed to materialize; with the next-generation audio formats (TrueHD, DTS-MA HD).
Now, I saved my two-cents for the end because I hate to be a downer, at least not right at the beginning of a post. I’m not a big fan of Tactile Transducers, ok that was a gross understatement, I really can’t stand these things. Yeah I know they buzz and bump the couch around and that’s big giggles for about 20 minutes, it’s the rest of my time watching the movie that I’m concerned with however.
I’ve even “experienced” top of the line Tactile Transducer demonstrations (the Runco/D-Box demo at CEDIA last year) and felt more annoyed than entertained, but hey to each their own. That said, I know folks who love Bass Shakers and I say more power to em. My only caution however would be to try before you buy, the novelty may not last through an entire chapter much less the whole movie.
Apr
1
Keeping Specifications in Perspective
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I’ll try my best to keep this as simple and to the point as possible, although that might be an overly optimistic goal considering the subject matter. I want to talk about specifications and expectations a bit, specifically with regard to displays (LCD, plasma, projectors etc.) but I suppose it applies just as well to any piece of gear.
Firstly manufacturers fib about product specifications all the time. Some manufacturers are worse than others but at one time or another just about every one of them has done it. Still think you can make informed buying decisions based on specifications? If so then that’s fine too, just keep in mind that you’ll get better results doing this comparing manufacturer (a) to manufacturer (a) on specs than (a) to (b). It’s entirely possible (a) and (b) used two completely different methods to arrive at that specification.
This brings me to my next point, sometimes specifications are the last thing someone wants to hear about. I’ll give you an example. Recently I had a client in our showroom and we had just finished looking at two very different projectors, one retailed for about $2k and the other for $5k. While we were wrapping up (in the 2k room) a customer came in and started raving about the $2k projector, adjectives and praise were tumbling out of his mouth a hundred miles an hour.
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