Trends and Discoveries at CES 2006

Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD: It’s war!

At all the shows preceding the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show, the Blu-ray and HD-DVD factions in the looming battle between high-definition optical-disc formats have done little more than rattle their sabers. Now it’s war. From my wanderings at CES 2006, I think Blu-ray has taken an early lead, though elsewhere you might read otherwise. Those publications will no doubt tell you that Toshiba will be the first to market, in March, when they launch their HD-A1 HD-DVD player ($499 USD). Besides stunning picture and sound -- something Blu-ray can also claim -- HD-DVD’s main advantages are that the discs are easy to manufacture and the laser heads comparatively cheap to build. The HD-A1 will be available alongside its more expensive brother, the HD-AX1 ($800; X for extra?).

Blu-ray will also be available in March, albeit in stealth form, when Sony releases the PlayStation 3. I’m no Svengali, but I’m willing to bet there are about 50 times as many PlayStation fans willing to buy a 3 right out of the delivery truck as there are home-theater early adopters. And once Blu-ray players are safely ensconced in all those PlayStation-equipped systems, do you think their owners will go out and spend more for another format? I don’t.

Besides, Blu-ray has one important plus: each disc can hold 50 gigabytes of data, while the current version of HD-DVD holds only 30GB. The downside is that Blu-ray discs and players are harder, and thus more expensive, to make.

The two new formats should look and sound the same -- after all, they’ve been designed to the same video and audio standards. But the benefits of HD-DVD accrue to the manufacturers, while the benefits of Blu-ray accrue to us, the users. The manufacturers are trying to tell us that we won’t need Blu-ray’s extra capacity, but that’s drivel -- there is no upper limit to the amount of capacity we’ll need. As soon as programmers get hold of Blu-ray’s 50GB, they’ll want more. So will we. My vote goes to Blu-ray.

720p joins 480p as yesterday’s format; 1080p is everywhere

Texas Instruments’ Digital Light Processing (DLP) engine has finally joined Sony’s VW100 in offering 1080p front projectors. TI’s 0.65", 1080p DLP chip features their new BrilliantColor technology, which expands the color wheel from three to six colors, thus pushing the number of available colors into the trillions and giving a 50% increase in brightness while maintaining the superior black levels they’ve lately demonstrated. Some of the more expensive sets have contrast levels in the 6000:1 range.

TI was using a projectiondesign Action! Model Three 1080 DLP projector in their theater at CES, and its brightness, saturation, and naturalness were as good as I’ve ever seen -- and that includes perfectly set-up CRTs projecting onto much smaller screens. The Action! will probably be pretty pricey, but the good news is that Optoma has already announced their version, the HD81, at under $10,000 -- less than a good 720p projector cost only two years ago. Hell, it’s less than some high-end makers are still charging for their 720ps.

As for 720p, it’s still a superb resolution, and the native format for sports-rich ABC and Fox -- and prices are dropping fast, fast, fast. All new 720p chipsets are also equipped with BrilliantColor, and in tests I’m doing right now they look marvelous. A few examples are the Mitsubishi HC3000 ($2995), Optoma HD72 ($1999 street), and InFocus Play Big 76 ($3000).

Two great all-in-one home-theater speaker systems

I’ve been partial to British speakers for years, especially the ones with coincident drivers -- the type where the tweeter sits right in the center of the woofer to create a more coherent sound. Two British firms that have made outstanding speakers of this type over the years have recently brought their prices down to human level for surround-sound lovers.

KEF calls their coincident-driver technology Uni-Q, and the system I heard was their Home Theatre 3000 ($1500, plus $150 for the recommended stands; available in March). Despite having quite small drivers, the 3000s put out a lot of sound. More important, when the program called for delicate soundstaging, as with orchestral music, these speakers sounded very much like a system costing $5000 or so. Each of the four corner speakers looks like an egg atop a needle, the center has a Uni-Q driver flanked by two small woofers in an oval configuration, and the subwoofer has two 10" drivers, one active, one passive. The sub I saw was sitting horizontally on a coffee-table shelf and looked like a gorgeous piece of sculpture. High WAF here.

A step up in price and oomph comes from the granddaddy of coincident drivers, Tannoy. The Arena is Tannoy’s least expensive speaker to use what they call their Dual Concentric Drivers. These small but beautiful speakers look like something that should be on display at the Museum of Modern Art, especially when perched atop their stands. Listening to the perfectly recorded soundstage of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, the sailors asleep below decks as the ship creaks and the waves lap against the hull, I could swear I smelled salt water. When the action started, the Arenas showed huge dynamic range and the kind of instantaneous transient response usually found only in much more expensive speakers. The cost for all five plus the sub: $2200.

Best orchestral sound 1

Ninety-five percent of film scores are made for less money than Brad Pitt’s hairdressing budget on Troy, and they usually have to be written and recorded within a few weeks. Yet movies still need music. For years, that meant using cheesy synthesizers or very small ensembles. Several years ago, with the advent of sampling technology, some companies had the brilliant idea of sampling orchestras. Sampling programs were created -- such as the Vienna Symphonic Library ($4800) and Professor Keith O. Johnson’s East West / Quantum Leap Platinum Edition Symphonic Orchestra ($2995) -- that gave a good enough representation of the real thing that you probably haven’t noticed their increasing use in recent years. But the composers who could afford these behemoths, let alone run them (the Vienna Symphonic Library requires 238GB), were usually working on big-budget films whose producers could afford an actual, full-size orchestra.

Along comes Gary Garritan, looking like Harry Potter at 40 and offering a program, the Garritan Personal Orchestra, that sounds 99% as good as East West or VSL (though offering fewer articulations) and costs only $299. Garritan’s secret is to use inexpensive orchestras, but record and assemble the samples perfectly. Composers who must work within small budgets can use Garritan’s samples to produce a final score that most viewers will never know isn’t a real orchestra.

Here’s the big surprise: Even big-ticket composers such as Mark Isham (Crash, Blade) and David Arnold (Stargate, Independence Day, Die Another Day) have chosen GPO for its high-quality sound and ease of use. A composer can create a score, drop it into a scoring program called Finale, and carry it around on a laptop. If the director or producer wants something changed, the composer can make the change on the spot and play it back in a very reasonable facsimile of what the final product will sound like.

I tried Garritan Personal Orchestra at home against an earlier edition of Vienna Symphonic Library and I think it sounds great. I love this product. Power to the people.

Best orchestral sound 2

After a couple of days of wandering the huge halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center, I was looking forward to enjoying some gorgeous music in the high-end halls of the Alexis Park Hotel. Wrong. Ninety percent of what I heard was audiophile shit (hereinafter referred to as AS): uninspired musicians on small labels, miked so closely that all of the room ambience was completely choked out of the overdamped recordings. These records (most exhibitors were playing vinyl) are aimed at producing maximum transient thrust and an impossibly clear sound, at the expense of any sense of a musical occasion. Think of a trumpet with a microphone stuck right down its throat, next to a drum set with a large-diaphragm condenser mike 2" from each drum head, a grand piano with a Neumann mike at each sound hole. You get the picture. I got a headache. "Do you have any ’50s jazz?," I kept asking -- anything where the musicians sounded as if they were in the same room.

Late one afternoon I peered down a hallway and saw someone walking out of the Anthony Gallo Acoustics room with a glass of wine. I’d heard Gallo’s little spherical speakers years ago and had been impressed with what he’d accomplished, but in the same sort of way Toyota impresses me when they can fit a 6’4" guy into the back seat of a Corolla. It doesn’t mean I’m going to buy one.

But the promise of free wine got me to at least stick my head in the door. The music was pleasant -- at least it wasn’t audiophile shit. I walked on in. No one paid any attention to me, so I sat down in front of a pair of Gallo Nucleus Reference 3 speakers ($2995/pair). Anthony Gallo himself, a big, Sopranos-looking guy, put on some orchestral music. The speakers and walls seemed to disappear as the room filled with music in a way I hadn’t heard in any other room at the show. I became so engrossed I lost contact with all the other people in the room -- I even lost interest in the free wine. I sat there for about 15 minutes, until the piece ended. I wanted to applaud.

If you’re looking for speakers at anywhere from $2000 to $10,000/pair, you have to give the Nucleus Reference 3s a try. I don’t remember having been so captured by a pair of speakers since the mid-1990s, when I first heard ATC’s active SCM50s -- and they cost $15,000.

Most fascinating character at the show

In general, serious audiophiles eschew too much tampering with the precious clarity we spend so much money and time preserving. So at T.H.E. Show (which takes place right next to and simultaneously with CES), I was surprised to see Rives Audio, a maker of parametric equalizers. My preconceived notions flew out the door when I found out that they’re also in the business of room design. EQ is only a small part of what they do.

What really fascinated me was talking to Chris Huston, Rives’ VP of acoustical engineering. I was shocked at how much he knew about the inner workings of recording studios. Turns out he has good reason to. He told me that he’d been a recording engineer and had worked on The Nazz’s first, eponymous album back in 1968 (it includes the hit "Hello It’s Me"). This has always been a favorite, especially for the powerful pre-punk sounds of "Open My Eyes." Well, as we kept talking, it emerged that he’d engineered some pretty big LPs: Led Zeppelin II, The Who Sell Out, the Rascals’ Groovin’, all of War’s albums, and the Bar-Kays’ Soul Finger. I tried to repress my admiration long enough to ask some questions.

Huston has developed a strong philosophy about what makes a good-sounding room and how to build one. We also got into a discussion about why so many recent rock recordings sound so awful, and why so many CES demos use AS. He said that, back in the 1950s and ’60s, and even into the early ’70s, when studios were still using two- and four-track recorders, necessity drove the engineers to keep everyone in the same room. The musicians were actually playing together. All that sound created rolling waves that affected the rest of the sound. Voilą! Ambience.

When studios began to switch to 24-track recorders, they tried to keep everyone together, but the bleed-over from track to track was so bad that they had to isolate each musician’s acoustic space. This led to late-’70s recordings sounding like 24 dead tracks mixed together into a thudding nothing, and it’s why everything sounds so lifeless to this day, and why so many audiophiles keep going back to older recordings for enjoyment. Today, people expect rooms to sound dead. Which, along with the use of uninspired musicians, is what leads to AS.

Fascinating discussion. If I had the money, I’d hire Huston to design my listening room just so I could sit there and listen to his stories. For an intriguing article by Huston about the decline of recording techniques, go to www.chrishuston.com, hit "Articles," then "The Sound Stage: Home Vs. Studio Control Room."

…Wes Marshall
wesm@soundstageav.com

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