Buying speakers can be a lot of fun. As you unpack your next piece of audio gear keep good care of the boxes, especially for big towers. Original speaker boxes are the absolute best protection to store, travel, and move your speakers in the future. Nothing’s worse when moving to a new dwelling than having a speaker or two ruined, cut, gouged, or scraped in the process.

Also, if you’re one to upgrade speakers every few years, the original speaker boxes usually make great shipping boxes if you choose to sell your used speakers.

Keep in mind a great set of speakers can last a truly long time… upwards of 20 years or more. Tie that to the general trend that people tend to move every 5-8 years, and those original speaker boxes may come in handy more than once.

A couple years ago you couldn’t grab a Blu-ray movie for under $30. If you did, it was a rarity. Finally the movie makers and marketers went back to their DVD marketing prowess with nice “buy me” pricing versus the high Blu-ray movie premiums they were trying to get away with before.

Now you can find movies even for as low $5, and not just the garbage movies. Great works like Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volumes and more can be added in all their studio master quality audio and video nirvana for just a few smackers.

What’s the huge deal? Blu-ray offers studio master quality video and sound quality. What that means is you can’t really get better quality, and thus you won’t need to ever re-purchase the movie unless time or wear forces a replacement.

We home theater nuts can be pretty snobby about audio quality. After all, why shouldn’t we be? We spend a great deal of time, money, and research learning how to eke even the tiniest amount of performance to get the most from our gear.

After all, audiophile grade speakers and CD transports make for some killer sound. Why would anything less be acceptable?

I had to deviate from common audiophile practices back in 2003. I actually researched audio compression codecs available in Apple’s QuickTime Pro at the time and found the  AAC MP4 audio format indistinguishable from CD playback. I was even able to fool myself with an A/B demo test.

Avatar. Nope.
Tron Legacy. Nuh ungh.
None of those movies did 3D as well and Transformers 3 did. Not even close.

I actually went to go see the 2D showing of Transformers 3 as I have been so put off by the 3D hype machine coming out of hollywood and consumer electronics, and the disappointment of the “forced focusing” of 3D elements that I just didn’t want to bother with 3D again.

But, lucky for me, the 2D showing had a blurry / juddering picture that was overly bright  which induced a slight headache causing me had to leave just 5 minutes into the movie. I let the theater know it was blurry and had judder issues, but I wasn’t about to take my chances with the rest of the movie so I switched to the 3D showing that started 30 minutes later. The 3D showing was crystal clear with no judder and correct brightness, in short, a perfect picture which was expected in the first place.

What does Transformers 3 do right where others failed? The implementation of 3D is spot on, in that the 3D enhances the movie instead of detracting from the it. In both Avatar and Tron,

When a new video format such as Blu-ray comes out, it truly is never fully out until the Star Wars saga is released on the format. This may initially sound like over-hyped bullocks, but it truly is not. When coveted pop culture movies come out, more people embrace new video formats to see their favorite films of all time like never before.

So mark your calendar for Sept 16 in the US (and four days prior internationally) because the Star Wars saga is coming to Blu-ray!

Let’s Take a Step Back…
The Star Wars franchise has had amajor impact in regards to movie theater technology and thus the home theater market as well.

It’s understandable why may consumers would be gun shy about home theater. There’s a ton of misinformation out there, and questions I often get have answers people may not want to hear. What’s the best TV? What’s the best receiver? What’s the best speaker maker? What’s the best Blu-ray player? Aren’t media based formats dead because of streaming?

Entertainment is big business. Walk through any retail outlet with movies on Blu-ray or DVD, audio on CD, and more video games you can shake a stick at. The choices are virtually limitless. The selection is indeed so vast, one has to question the validity of it all.

With so much noise it’s easy to get lost in all but the most successful movies, music and games. Hundreds of mainstream movies were released in 2010. Add indie and foreign films, and that number crawls into the thousands. Taking into consideration just the hundreds of mainstream movies made in America last year, and you can see how it’s easy for new media creations get lost in the mix.

Yup even Tron cannot save this one for me.  During the previews for Tron Legacy 3D IMAX there was a jungle themed animal preview that had a few great scenes. In those scenes the 3D effect wasn’t the gimmickry “look at me” usually found in 3D movies, but rather a realistic plane of existence with 3D done in a way that made the objects look real, but not “over dimensional”.

Even with seeing some promise of the 3D format, the non-gimmick hyper-3D look segments of the jungle preview still only made up about 5% of the actual preview’s video. The rest of the preview was in hyper 3D, as was almost all of Tron.

Movie theaters have an easier sell when it comes to 3D than the home theater market does. 3D movies tend to just be $5 more per ticket, and the passive glasses aren’t that bad to wear. For the home market the cost of entry is a bit higher. Namely a 3D capable HDTV, Blu-ray player, and receiver, with shutter glasses that may or may not number enough for your entire household.

Having a home theater today couldn’t be more of a cost saving entertainment mecca during harder economic times. A home theater can provide all of your entertainment needs with little need for much else (as long as you don’t mind becoming a bit of a TV junky).

As computer processing capabilities increase in home theater equipment, so does the lure of manufacturers to pile on odd interfaces and features that simply don’t work, can be awkward to use, and at their worst – are so complex that consumers simply live with components not setup correctly.

It’s an ever-moving pendulum in the consumer electronics world. There’s times when consumer electronics are just packed with quirky esoteric features, then manufacturers get a better at understanding of how people actually use their products, and pull back features to make their home theater components easier-to-understand and use.

The pull back is usually not voluntary, and is usually triggered through competition. Then companies attempt to follow suit and learn from the competition.

With flawless Blu-ray playback and DVD upconverting capabilities, the PS3 may have finally hit the entertainment mark by being perhaps one of the best home theater components you can buy.  Oh… and it plays next-generation HD games to boot!

I’m also a huge fan of the Wii and X-Box 360, but the PS3 transcends those (in a home theater sense) by being able to replace an upconverting DVD player and providing Blu-ray playback. I don’t even use the gaming aspect of the PS3 at all, as the games I have for the Wii and X-Box 360 feed my gaming addiction.

Most consumers know Blu-ray offers HD video quality, but it also offers HD surround sound formats that can have huge impact on the sound performance of your home theater. However, bringing these HD surround formats home can be a bit of chore due to complexity, connections issues, and just setting up the player.

Unlike standard DVD, where one digital audio connection serves all the audio formats, there’s more then one way to setup a Blu-ray player to integrate HD surround into your home theater.

Stores have become awash with multi-displays on their show floors making it impossible to get a good demo of TVs you’re interested in. With it getting harder and harder to get a demo of any TV, it can be definitely a hard shopping experience for those that actually want a demo before laying out a couple thousand dollars.

TV Shopping Has Changed
You could go to a niche hi-fi hut to get the latest TV, but chances are you want get the best deal or the best bang for your buck. I love the small hi-fi huts, and will always go to them for high-end components and speakers of any level of quality, but TV shopping has simply changed.

It’s easy to caught up in the upgrade and improvement bubble wherein your home theater is in constant flux. This is especially true when it comes to Blu-Ray versus DVD now that HD-DVD is gone. For home theater nuts, it’s a never-ending love… until, that is, you reach your personal home theater nirvana.

The nirvana moment may never come unless you take a step back to realize how good the home theater you’ve built actually is. How good? Try way better than theater quality!

TV makers have added tons of new features, high-resolution capabilities, computer connectivity, and vast image quality improvements in their TVs. Despite all the improvements, they all miss the mark on one issue that is totally destroying the picture quality regardless of the latest technology… picture geometry.

Picture geometry is nowhere near as sexy on an ad as “1080p”, “screen size”, or “flat panel”, but it is the one issue I commonly see at trade shows, friends homes, and even in my own home from time to time. At issue is the incorrect screen mode being used to display content.

Blu-ray has won the high-definition DVD war. Honestly both HD-DVD and Blu-ray offered high-quality HD movies and it was a total shame that the war had to occur in the first place. The animosity of consumers in online forums was unprecedented as they argued for whichever format they “invested” in.

I was on neither side as I was willing to buy both HD-DVD and Blu-ray. About five times in the last year I was really close to buying a standalone Sony Blu-ray player. I did get an HD-DVD player, but I got it on the cheap at $150 (at the time the cheapest player was $299) as an X-Box 360 add-on.

These two high-definition DVD formats have been battling for a couple years now and after living with HD-DVD for the better part of a year I can honestly say I’m not impressed. The image and sound is better on HD-DVD than on standard DVD, but not so much so that I’m willing to spend 2-3 times as much on new releases for the benefit. At $30-$40 per new release movie, the value proposition just fails. With every movie not available on both high-def formats, I’ll be watching my standard DVD collection for a long time.

Preplanning may seem like an obvious notion, but the excitement of building a home theater brings with it the impatience to enjoy the fruits of your labors. You can save time, aggravation, and costly mistakes by taking a little time to plan how your equipment will work/grow in your room, weighing room design decisions, and evaluating equipment for your home theater.

Consumers plan, research, and finally purchase home theater equipment every day. It can be easy to think the gear you bought was perfect since you spent time and researched the product. In the highly competitive home theater market things can happen that can make equipment break, and price is not always an indicator of quality.

Sometimes it can be hard to justify the cost of a home theater to a significant other. Despite the obvious advancement in picture and sound quality offered by home theater sometimes a long hard look at the money you’ll save by being entertained at home can open up your finance committee’s purse strings.

For home theater enthusiasts HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray is a strong debate with those who bought into either format spouting off why their chosen format is better. For the normal home theater consumer though there may be no debate as the DVD format is so pervasive, and looks great on most any HDTV.

Home Theater is invariably complex. Multiple components connected together to a TV with enough remotes and connection types to drive a normal person mad. Add HDTV with its multiple aspect ratios that need to be changed depending on the source material, and you can see why there are tons of web sites, magazines, and forums which attempt to help people find the right components and get the most from what they have.

A long time ago a theater was a special place to go with elegant settings, and respect among theater attendees that it indeed was a special event. Theaters now deliver the best picture quality and sound they ever have, but the experience is about as great as shopping for groceries.

Created in the early 90s and released as a consumer product in 1996, DVD has been around a while. While 10+ years is a long time for any format, the standard-definition DVD format continues to offer astounding picture quality on both standard-definition TVs and large widescreen HDTVs. With all the talk and hype about Blu-ray and HD-DVD one would think that DVD will soon be obsolete, but that couldn’t further from the truth.

I’ve used an older Apple PowerBook laptop as an iTunes jukebox connected to my home theater for stereo music for over three years now. No music is actually on the PowerBook. It connects wirelessly to my main computer in the office, which houses my complete music library. Using iTunes on a laptop is perhaps one of the best ways to serve music in my opinion as having a full working iTunes application means that I can easily search and scroll through playlists and thousands of songs with ease.

Many consumers simply don’t know how long they can expect their home theater gear to last. With the expectation that consumers get from the computer industry one could easily assume that home theater gear only lasts 2-4 years at best, but that could not be further from the truth. With this knowledge you may be inclined to get equipment that can grow with you, or perhaps, lead you to spend a little more to get something that can.

Building your first home theater can seem like a daunting task. For video there are so many technologies, sizes, and price points that the options can simply overwhelm someone looking to build their first home theater. More often than not, with so much attention focused on the video side of things the audio portion is often just quickly thrown together. Assembling the audio portion of your first home theater can make or break your upgrade options in the future.

No doubt many of you out there have purchased or received home theater over the holidays, or know friends or family members who have. For many newbies out there, you may not know how easy it is to get the most from your new system. A few quick tips can make a world of difference in how your new home theater equipment performs. For those of you who know a bit about home theater you can help your friends and family out with these quick tips.

I recently jumped head long into the high-definition DVD format mix when I picked up an HD-DVD drive addition to the X-Box 360. I ran into absolutely no hardware issues as the drive worked flawlessly, but my experience with actually purchasing content was a major source of frustration.

Over the last year the industry has been touting 1080p as “Full HD”. Giving the false presumption that you’re not getting the entire HD signal or worse yet, confusing consumers into thinking that anything not 1080p isn’t worth getting.