Indeed, I have made it to Australia. After 40 or so hours in transit with three young boys we arrived in Perth – exhausted, jet lagged, and generally discombobulated. But we’re here. My wife’s company is putting us up for two weeks so that we can find a place to live and a car. Is that a lot of time? No. So we’ve been seeing as many rental properties as possible. And what does Tom do the minute he walks into a stranger’s house? You guessed it, check out the speakers. Let’s just say that compared to the HTiB systems I generally run into in the states, Oz is crushing us in the HT department. Read the rest of this entry »

Think your local AV installer can’t be cool? Well, you’re probably right. And in case you were wondering, they can’t rap either.

Now that’s just funny, I don’t care who you are. Great job HiPhi!

I received this response from one of our listeners to our most recent podcast on MP3s. Thank you Harold from Austria for your insightful email.

As a loyal listener as well as professional audio engineer I feel the need to respond to your podcast about MP3 in general and the idea of “hearing the difference” between uncompressed and MP3 audio.

Short story: Although I have no doubt that the fellow studio guy did a great job of producing theses files, it does prove NOTHING but instead your conclusion of this is what mp3 is missing is highly misleading! Read the rest of this entry »

As many of you are aware, the recent podcast and Audioholics article uncovered that the $3,500 Lexicon BD-30 essentially is a $500 Oppo BDP-83 with a pretty case. What also occurred is that another publication – Home Theater Review.com – published a review of the Lexicon before we got a chance to test our review sample. What was most unfortunate (for them) is that the reviewer not only did not use any objective tests of the Lexicon, but also claimed to have compared it to the upgraded BDP-83SE. The reaction of the public to this review after the Audioholics exposé was… well… energetic to say the least. Read the rest of this entry »

In light of the recent podcast and the Audioholics article on the Lexicon/Oppo debacle, I can’t help but think back on some of things I expected to find in this business when I got into it. Let’s be honest, it’s easy to demonize a lot of the people you read (or watch, or hear about). They become caricatures of real people. They are malicious or stupid or conniving or nefarious… the list goes on. But when you meet them, they tend to be just like you – humans trying to do their best with what they have. There are always extenuating circumstances, always reasons, always a bunch of behind the scene stuff you don’t know. That if you only knew, you’d understand.

I’m wondering what those are at Lexicon and THX. Read the rest of this entry »