I was peer reviewing a loudspeaker review today and had to laugh when I got to the reviewer’s conclusion – which went something like this:

“After hearing this system I can maybe, sort of, in particular cases recommend this product to some people sometimes if they really want it perhaps.”
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People love shootouts. Heck, WE love speaker shootouts. And we’ve wanted to line one up for some time. Back in May we started the planning stages and assembled a bunch of products for extended loan and review. Now we’re here. We’re ready. We’re… well, we’re doing a lot of cable swapping and listening.

I’m sitting here in Reference System 1 along with Gene DellaSala, Tom Andry and J. Walker Clarke. We’re arranging a handful of loudspeakers from the likes of Hsu Research, RBH Sound, Dali, Ascend Acoustics, AV123, Polk Audio and Usher Audio. It’s not often that we can get together like this to compare and contrast eight (8) pairs of speakers – with measurements. So far the morning has been filled with unboxing speakers, setup, photos… and a heated discussion of how we could have forgotten to bring Gears of War to fill in the time in between measurements.
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Or partially wrong… I won’t admit total “wrongness”. This Michael Bay film was one of his better attempts, but still had some moments that made me wish he hadn’t appealed to his innate need for “campiness” and avoiding a more in-depth plot. It didn’t ruin the genre as I had expected, but a human, rather than robot focus made it a far different film than many (myself included) may have been expecting.

Great Expectations
When I entered the theater I expected an action-packed movie that would utterly disappoint me and prove to be a completely meaningless, sappy, cliche-driven movie that took you on a roller coaster ride and didn’t really hold true to the original Generation 1 Transformers world that we 30-somethings loved so much as kids.
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Right now I’ve got three projectors in for review, however I’m only focusing on two of them in this post: a $4000+ Mitsubishi HC5000 1080p 3LCD projector and a ~$400 BoxTV projector.

This Mitsubishi is one of the best projectors I’ve tested in the past 2 years. The BoxTV projector uses a $30 bulb and has only 640×480 resolution, but offers a very inexpensive alternative for your kids to play games on a system that doesn’t make you sweat having to replace the bulb…

Such is the life of a reviewer. When dealing with apples and oranges you need to review each product in its own category. Is the Mitsubishi better than the BoxTV – heck yeah. Is the BoxTV rated against the Mitsubishi? Heck no, that would be like failing the Ford Focus because it’s not as fast as a corvette and doesn’t have the towing capacity of a Toyota Tundra pickup.
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I thought I’d share an excerpt from my latest editorial “10 MORE Reasons Why HD-DVD Formats Have Already Failed”

I was given a first-hand experience of the absolute apathy people have towards the new high definition formats when I invited my father-in-law and brother-in-law over for a movie night. We watched Batman Begins on HD DVD, arguably a reference disc. We watched it on an ISF-calibrated 1080p projector (a Mitsubishi HC5000, in for review from ProjectorPeople.com) and the results were amazing. Even though I told them they were watching it in true high definition they never seemed to understand the significance. You see, to the average consumer, DVDs are high definition.
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