Innholdsfortegnelse for September - October 2022 i Sound + Image

PROJECTORS — WHAT YOU NEED TO CONSIDER… BRIGHTNESS It seems obvious, but it’s all about brightness. Too few lumens will leave you unable to enjoy your big picture in anything but near-darkness, or will require you to brighten your image by bringing the projector forward and shrinking your screen. Which, of course, isn’t the point of it all… USE A SCREEN The screen is an integral part of a projection system. As you can read in our installation feature this issue (p74), you should consider the whole system, not just your projector. Without a screen you are effectively hobbling the projector’s abilities, kinda like buying a great hi-fi system but then using cheap speakers on the end of it. Many casual projector users just shine their image onto a white…

Devialet Dione soundbar If you thought the soundbar in our previous review represented an upmarket offering, well, you weren’t looking high enough. If you crane your neck rather more and peer up towards the mountaintop, you may just be able to pick out the price level occupied by the Devialet Dione. Nearly four grand for a soundbar isn’t entirely unprecedented: Sennheiser has its Ambeo soundbar (see News p10) at the same level. And both of these lofty offerings are bars which work on their own, with no subwoofer alongside for the frequencies that most bars are simply too small to deliver. Build & features If you haven’t heard of Devialet, you may have at least seen this French company’s distinctive ‘Phantom’ active speakers (pictured below), widely praised for their remarkable…

Sonos Ray soundbar Here’s a far smaller soundbar solution than those so far, and more affordable too, at just $399. And yet it’s a Sonos, from the company that gained a massive first-to-market advantage in the whole genre of streaming and multiroom audio. As a result of this and the ‘Apple-like’ design of its elegantly-crafted but pricey speakers, the brand has an aspirational cachet that attracts many users. We find that their sound can sometimes be more populist than really hi-fi quality in general, but we do acknowledge that the Sonos wireless system is a leader in terms of robust and reliable connection, and for that combination of qualities we’re unlikely to steer anyone away from the brand. But now here’s a rather less pricey Sonos ticket, and for a…

KEF LSX II wireless active speakers KEF is going gangbusters for its 60th anniversary celebrations, releasing brand-new designs and a whole slew of upgraded models, among them the latest editions of its dinky little wireless speakers, the KEF LSX. The original LSX found success in taking the active wireless playback that KEF had developed for the larger LS50 model and squeezing all that tech into far smaller speakers, just 24cm high and not even six inches wide. Everything was optimised to make the smaller speakers especially easy to use, since their relative affordability would appeal to a wider and less technical audience. Now comes the new version II, and as with the first, these are active wireless speakers, no amps required, just do your music streaming, and if you like,…

Netflix, Ambeo, & spatial stereo The first time we featured Sennheiser’s Ambeo in Sound+Image, it was in relation to nine-channel music recordings. Sennheiser’s then ‘tonmeister’ and sound engineer Gregor Zielinsky was pioneering music recordings in 9.1, and spent several years demoing and advocating this recording technique at expert meetings and (mainly pro) audio conventions, culminating with more open demonstrations at CES 2016 in Las Vegas, and elsewhere. This variation of multichannel audio was designed more for use with music than movies, and required replay on a 9.1-channel loudspeaker system. Against obvious competition, it never seemed destined for greatness, and multichannel music has gone on to become dominated, like multichannel movie soundtrack streaming, by Dolby Atmos presentations in varying degrees of quality. But that form of Ambeo in 9.1 did find…

As we set up the new GS50 from Taiwan’s BenQ, it occurred to us that it combines characteristics from the last two BenQ projectors through our doors. The physical design puts it clearly in the same camp as the near-cubic BenQ 3000i — but that was a 4K projector more than double the price of this one. Technically the GS50 is closer to the Sound+Image award-winning GV30, a ‘portable’ projector with an unusual circular design which made it very easy to aim (straight up at the ceiling if you wish), while being super-simple to set-up. A lot of those abilities transfer over to this GS50 equally successfully. But here you get more lumens, and higher resolution — this delivers a Full-HD pixel count of of 1920 × 1080 (compared with…

SOUNDBARS – WHAT YOU NEED TO CONSIDER… SOUNDBAR OR SYSTEM? Soundbars are not, in general and with exceptions, our favourite way of delivering TV sound. They were created as a compromise for those who didn’t want a full-size surround system or even a stereo hi-fi in their home, both of which, of course, we love. Even if neatness is your goal, an unobtrusive pair of active speakers either side of the TV can sound more ‘hi-fi’ than a soundbar and will double as a fine music system, something many soundbar designs conspicuously fail to achieve. But we should add that the very best soundbars manage to overcome even these inherent prejudices of ours. WALL OR BENCH Soundbars are most commonly used on a bench in front of your TV. So…

Every time a Devialet comes to visit, it brings with it a host of acronyms, which is all the more surprising from a French company, which might be thought unlikely to rack up so many initialisations based on English words. A few are new to the Dione; others are established technologies used on other products. Allow us to lexicographically enlighten you… ADE (Advanced Dimensional Experience) is a signal processing algorithm which Devialet claims to have patented. It “combines ingenious speaker placement detection and advance digital filters to deliver superior multichannel audio through beamforming techniques”. ADH is not an attention issue, but Devialet’s longterm analogue-digital hybrid amplification technology (boldly, indeed, called the world’s first hybrid amplification technology. The way they explain it, four digital amplifiers provide the grunt of amplification, while…

This home cinema room was designed as an integral part of a newly-constructed home on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria. The owners were no strangers to the wonders of home entertainment, having enjoyed a number of high-end audio and video systems during the last 30 years, telling us that they “know what looks good and sounds great!” Indeed this is their third dedicated cinema room, and the second which has been developed in conjunction with a team led by Alan Anderson of Andersons AVI, supported by Steve Spurrier of Studio Connections, distributor of Genelec speakers, and Paul Kutcher of Visual Fidelity, distributor of Stewart Filmscreen. “I’ve known this family for many years, ever since they had a home cinema installed at a different property,” Alan Anderson tells us. “I’ve stayed…

March Audio Sointuva WG stereo loudspeakers We first encountered March Audio in 2020, when it had released a series of amplifiers from its headquarters in Perth, WA, and had just begun using power modules from Denmark’s Purifi (see panel overleaf). One of March Audio’s amps, the P452 stereo power amplifier (now called the P422), went on to win a Sound+Image Award. But Purifi in Denmark also makes an unusual new design of loudspeaker driver. And when Alan March tried out this 6.5-inch Purifi driver, it proved to be just the thing he was seeking to achieve a speaker design he was developing. “We had analysed all the usual suspects, but this Purifi driver was truly exceptional,” says Alan March. “It is the lowest-distortion longest-stroke driver of its size; indeed its…

It was 1974, and Bruce Springsteen was feeling the twin pressures of critical acclaim and commercial apathy. The artist dubbed “the future of rock ‘n’ roll” in a much-quoted review by critic (and Springsteen’s future manager) Jon Landau was two misfiring albums down, his major-label paymasters growing restless. “Cult artists don’t last on Columbia Records,” reflected Springsteen in his autobiography. “We miss this one, contract’s up, and in all probability, we’ll be sent back to the minors deep in the South Jersey Pines. I had to make a record that was the embodiment of what I’d been slowly promising I could do. It had to be something epic and extraordinary.” The genesis of Born To Run was less grandiose, Springsteen sketching the song while sat on the end of his…

We rarely descend to the land of actual pico-projectors for our reviews, as our experience with them to date has been sub-optimal, shall we say. As their name suggests, pico-projectors are small, their resolutions generally low, and the power behind their projection distinctly limited. Their primarily advantage lies in price, and in portability, since they can usually operate on battery power, although battery life can be so low that you may not make it to the end of a movie. But here Philips uses the prefix ‘Pico’ on something which is really a step up in category terms, since the PicoPix MaxTV uses proper DLP projection technology from Texas Instruments rather than the usual single LCD panel of picos, and it also offers respectable Full-HD resolution of 1920 × 1080…

Bowers & Wilkins Panorama 3 soundbar Soundbars these days often come from companies that manufacture TVs; they see the potential in selling an additional unit to beef up the sound of their own TVs that, er, don’t sound very good on their own. But the earliest soundbars all came from loudspeaker companies, especially those that were already innovative in their designs, and so weren’t entirely put off by the difficulties of designing a long wide thin loudspeaker into which you couldn’t fit a driver much wider than your fist. Bowers & Wilkins wasn’t among the earliest of those companies; rather it waited until the market was proven and then came in with a shiny high-end version of the breed in 2009. That was the first Bowers & Wilkins Panorama soundbar,…

Polk MagniFi Mini AX soundbar + subwoofer see p31 The MagniFi Mini AX is full of surprises. Polk has delivered a rather different soundbar and subwoofer solution — although it’s hard to call it a bar, really, when it sits like a little humpy at the centre of your TV. A TV speaker? A lozenge, perhaps. So here’s an unusual sound lozenge and subwoofer solution. Equipment The lozenge is remarkably small, just a ruler’s length at 34cm wide; we had thought it larger from pictures we had seen, and had wondered where we might put it to prevent it covering the bottom of our benched TV screen. But no, at 8cm high it was just perfect to fit below our resident 75-inch Samsung. Check that 8cm height against your own…

Rega Elicit MK5 integrated amplifier Say Rega; think turntables. It’s inevitable: not only have Rega Planar record decks been around since the original 1970s renaissance in source equipment, they have stood out in their design, Rega guru Roy Gandy favouring lightness and rigidity over the weighty high-mass approach of most manufacturers. As the years went by and Rega’s ambitions rose, their turntables got ever more skeletal and brilliantly braced, so that one imagines the ultimate realisation of Gandy’s engineering path will be something like an anti-black hole — weightless but infinitely rigid, with cosmic forces that somehow spin its local area of space with a resonance of 3.487168 radians per second (or, more familiarly, 33⅓ rpm). But what’s this? It’s a Rega amplifier. The first one of these appeared back…

If the 1980s belonged to just one actor, it was Harrison Ford. The decade began with Ford playing iconic roles in two of the biggest film franchises ever; it ended with him having five of its highest-grossing movies and a billion dollars’ worth of ticket sales to his credit. More importantly, the ‘80s also marked Ford’s emergence as a respected, multi-faceted Oscar-nominated actor who made interesting career choices and could carry intelligent movies just as well as a blaster or bullwhip. Not that Ford’s success in the ‘80s looked certain. On the contrary, things seemed bleak for the carpenter-turned-actor at the start of the decade: in the three years after Star Wars had propelled him to stardom, Ford failed to capitalise on the success of his turn as Han Solo…