Like almost all audio nuts, I had picked up most of whatever early information I had from various sources, some of the most fruitful being the question sections of various magazines. Joseph Giovanelli and Herman Burstein offered scads of useful stuff in Audio magazine, as did Norman Eisenberg in High Fidelity. A relative latecomer to this group ...

Mentor Floyd Toole with his amazing 1970s sideburns   My first few days on the job as an audio journalist all those years ago seemed like winning the lottery. In earlier jobs, I had always been the guy people came to to waste time talking about hi-f. Now, here I was in extensive discussions about sound equipment, and from time to time I was ...

Today, it seems hard to believe, but when I was growing up, the ultimate in high technology was audio. How I managed to get interested in the field is a mystery to me, as it certainly was to my family -- my parents thought they had spawned some kind of alien.Nevertheless, I was interested in audio from earliest childhood. Actually, my prime focus ...

Editor's Note: Please join TheaterFocus in welcoming Ian G. Masters to his first blog.  Ian G. Masters Excuse me, let me just move a few of these boxes to make some space. As long as I'm going to inhabit this small corner of the blogosphere, I should give myself a little elbow room. In fact, I've been clearing stuff out for some time now. ...

I had an interesting chat yesterday with my local high end dealer. He has a store in town called Soundstage that specializes in really esoteric high end stuff. His store carries names like Conrad Johnson, Martin Logan, Arcam and a whack of others I've never heard of. Among the listening rooms are severely exotic kits with tube amps and alien ...

   Outlaw announced that it has had to roll with the times and increase prices on some of its most popular offerings. The 7500 and 7700 multi-channel amps are still the most affordable products in their class despite the modest price increase.   Effective July 1st '06 Outlaw had to bend to market forces that increases the cost ...

This is the weekend that most of North America is united in sitting outside on lawn chairs drinking cold beverages and maybe catching some fireworks (well, not literally catching but - you know what I mean). The US celebrates its hard fought independence from the UK through the spilling of blood and tea into the Boston harbor. Canada ...

I think the BD and HD DVD format war can be retired as a topic of lightweight discussion, at least by me. It's become a very politically charged matter.   I submitted an editorial piece to Audioholics the other day, posted by Clint. It got a lot of attention from readers wanting my blood for everything from not telling the ''whole'' story ...

THX began life as a series of specifications for movie theaters back in the early 1980s when George Lucas was appalled by the varying audio/video quality that movie goers had to suffer. The first THX showroom opened in 1983 when the THX division of Lucasfilm opened. In 1990 the standard was applied to home sound systems, a sweet spot that has ...

  Now that both formats have their first devices on the table let's see where the format war stands by comparing both feature sets. We'll include Capacity, Interactive Features, Content Protection and everyone's favorite - Managed Copy as our categories. We won't include movie selection because neither has the Star Wars or Lord of the ...