Technical Reviews

Digital audio room correction is nothing new of course yet researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden have developed their own. Dirac Research was founded in 2001 and has not only applied their technology in the automotive...

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed the Anthem ARC (Anthem Room Correction) firmware that is present in their SSPs as well as the AVRs which have a  reduced filter bank size. By far, the most significant sonic issue for acoustic music when a subwoofer is deployed occurs around the crossover from the subwoofer to the main speaker. In Part 2 of this series, we take a look at Anthem's ARC (Anthem Room Correction) when adding a subwoofer to the system.

Readers of Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity are likely familiar with the names Stacey Spears and Don Munsil. They authored the Secrets DVD Benchmark and brought to light issues like Chroma Upsampling Errors, as well as our recent HDMI Benchmark for Blu-ray players. They also authored the Spears and Munsil HD Benchmark Blu-ray test disc. Version 2 of their HD Benchmark disc is now available, and reviewed here.

Our first HDMI Benchmark article generated a lot of feedback and support from our readers, but also a lot of skepticism.

It's hard to believe that we are already into the second decade of the 21st Century, and now all future Blu-ray players will have to deliver their HD content digitally over HDMI only, with analog component video outputs limited to 480 lines of resolution (480p).

In May, 2010, Senior Editor Chris Heinonen and I published an article here on Secrets looking at some of the popular consumer targeted video calibration software options. We tried the free HCFR program as well as the incredibly popular CalMAN platform marketed by SpectraCal, and a new entry, ChromaPure.