The HARMAN Luxury Audio Group hosted a pre-CEDIA event for the media at their Northridge facility in southern California on September 15th. We started our day ...
The Casablanca platform dates back to 1996. Designed with an upgradeable architecture, Theta has offered continuous hardware and software upgrades to stay current with the demands of the A/V technologies.
During CEDIA 2011, one technology that caught my attention was HDBaseT. It provided a solution to the all too familiar cable clutter problem. Below is a picture that I took at their booth which shows a set of cables whose signals could all be transmitted over a single Cat5e/6 cable at distances up to 100m.
A recent search on DTV stations in the San Francisco Bay Area listed all the channels within 100 miles of San Francisco. The list was long. Many transmitter locations were far away, so I was not going to receive all the channels. But still, the count was healthy. The site even listed several stations that are not broadcasting yet, but had either applied for or had received approval by the FCC. The ClearStream Micron Over-the-Air Indoor Antenna is designed to pull in those distant stations. Does it work?
I caught the HTPC bug sometime back and went about building one after receiving component recommendations from Sandy Bird, one of our Senior Editors. The installation went smoothly. Then, one day I encountered an issue I had not seen before. Switching the source input from the HTPC to some other source, such as my DVR, and then back to the HTPC would sometimes give a small 800x600 window centered on the display. The output was no longer 1080p, the resolution I started out with.
Several months have elapsed since I've had this system, and during that time this loudspeaker ensemble has provided me with a truly exceptional experience. In looking back at the review, I see that I have used nothing but superlatives to describe their sound. This system is very well-rounded across the frequency range. The timbre is both accurate and well-matched within the family.
Sumit received a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1997 and has been working in the software industry in Silicon Valley ever since. He currently works on implementing image processing algorithms for Foveon, a startup company that makes image sensor chips for digital cameras. Prior to joining Foveon, he held engineering positions at Shutterfly and SGI, where he developed software for digital image enhancement and video capture respectively. Sumit enjoys retreating to his A/V room to listen to music or watch movies. He lives in San Carlos, California with his wife and two children, who he hopes will grow up to be audiophiles! Sumit has been a contributor and Senior Editor for Secrets for over 10 years.