Scott Wilkinson (15:26)
Let'S see. Novus Nick says I spin LPs daily. Where, where did you know? Sometimes this thing just zips right past me. Also run tubes with that setup. There he goes. There I am. Yeah. Okay, so you're an analog file and good for you. That's great. I am not. But more power to you if that's the way. If that floats your boat. You know, analog records, vinyl played through tube amplifiers, preamps and amplifiers, keeping the signal analog all the way from the needle to the speakers. That is a valid philosophy. Absolutely. No question about it. I will tell you this. Analog audio generally costs more money. If you have a digital system, it might be expensive at the beginning, but after a while you can stamp out a million chips and the cost per chip goes way down in that case. And so digital audio systems can be inexpensive and still perform really well. With analog, you can't do that. They are inherently more expensive because you can't churn out a million of them. And so they're more handmade, sort of, and it just requires more finesse. And so analog, good analog electronics are always going to be expensive. Which is why one reason why the audiophile hobby is so expensive. I mean, I did a show here at Home Theater geeks about a million dollar stereo. This guy spent 30 years building this stereo or this system with a turntable on a, you know, 1500 pound base and these speakers that were 10ft tall, maybe 8ft still all analog. He, you know, and he said it, it sounded great and I'm sure it did, but it cost a million dollars. He had to build onto his house, he had to add an addition to his house to support and accommodate this system. I have never been into that. That's just me. If, if you've got the resources to really go analog all the way, as I said, more power to you. Personally, I do not like vinyl for the fact that you get pops and clicks. The vinyl can be damaged even if you treat it very carefully. It's very fragile in a way. There's more noise involved. So I prefer the cleaner digital sound. But there are many, many people who say that vinyl has a warmth that digital doesn't have. We can debate this all day and I'm not going to. All I'm going to say is if you enjoy your rig, more power to you. Okay, let's see. What do we got here? John Gerard Berkeley, California Is it. Is the TCL TV you were talking about? I don't remember the series. I don't either. I'd have to go look that up the top of the line. I, I'm thinking it was the nine series. Last I looked at tcl, I think the nine series was the top of the line. Foreign. Let's see. Nicholas Menard why do some studios release physical media not in the original form? No Dolby Vision or aspect ratio. Or limit a movie to 66 gigabyte disk instead of 100 gigabyte gigabytes when there's no technical information? Yeah, I don't like that either. I don't like that when they don't provide technical information. Now why do some studios release physical media not in the original form? I'm not sure that's true. I, I would think that if a movie. Let's talk about movies hat you know, was released in the theater recently in Dolby Vision or in high dynamic range? Well, in the movies only Dolby Cinemas would have Dolby Vision. But they would master it for home use in high dynamic range on a UHD Blu Ray with surround sound or Dolby Atmos immersive sound. I would think that if the movie had been released long long ago, if it was a classic movie and they put it on a disc without all that stuff, they were trying to be purists releasing the movie as it had been made rather than trying to enhance it with a new technology. It's the only thing I can think of what you might be talking about there. Limiting a movie to 66 gigabytes instead of a hundred. I don't know why they would do that either. I, I'm trying to remember what Blue. What? The Blu Ray. The Blu Ray capacity I believe is on the order of 50 gigabytes. Might be 66. You could get 100 if you went dual layer. But some players might balk at that. So they might be trying to make it as compatible as possible with as many players as possible. Okay. Sushi. Are you familiar with LG's B4 series OLED? Specifically the 48 inch best buy have this has this exclusive for 599 bucks. Is there something wrong with the B4? The 48 inch C4 is 8.99 worth the higher money. Well, the B4 and the C4 are now. Well they're I guess they're one year old. I guess they're up to the C5 and 6,5 B5. The answer is, I think that probably the C4 is worth the extra money. There's nothing wrong with the B4. The primary difference is that the B4 is probably using a lesser video processor and the B4. I believe the refresh rate on the screen is 60Hz, whereas I believe the C4 is 120. And having a higher refresh rate is a good thing. You might not like the soap opera effect. So if the TV has a refresh rate of 120Hz, 120 frames per second, you're not getting content at 120 frames per second. You're getting it at 24 or 60. And most modern TVs can do something called frame interpolation. And what that means is they'll take a look at a frame and they'll take a look at the next frame and they'll see what's the processor, I mean, in the tv. And they'll look and see. It will look and see. Is there anything moving? If so, where would it be? If there was a frame in the middle between those two frames and it interpolates where that would be. A lot of people hate that effect. What that does is it makes motion sharper. So if there's a ball flying through the air, a plane or a car going down the street or something like that, the motion, the object in motion appears sharper without it. It appears blurry as it's moving, depending on how fast it's moving. So they put in this thing called frame interpolation, or it's sometimes called MEMC motion estimation, motion compensation. And it works. But it produces this weird side effect artifact called the soap opera effect. It makes the content look like it was shot on video, like a soap opera, hence the name. Now, with TV shows, that's not such a bad. Well, I should take that back. Most, most all movies are shot at. Almost all movies are shot at 24 frames per second. TV is sometimes shot at 24 frames per second, sometimes at 60. If it's shot at 60, it does have a more video look. People complain about high frame rate movies like Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk or Gemini man, both by Ang Lee. They were made by Ang Lee and he shot them at high frame rates and showed them in high frame rates. And people thought that it looked artificial. Again, I'm in the minority. I liked the way they looked. I really liked the way those movies looked because the Motion was sharp. Sharp, and the detail was phenomenal. I. I like it. A lot of people don't, and I think I'm in the minority, but so be it. Anyway, so if you want to turn frame interpolation off, then you don't really need 120 frames per second. You can get by with 60. But I'd rather have the flexibility, the option of turning that on if you want. Also, if you're a gamer, you want a higher refresh rate because games can go up to 144 frames per second or more. And so having that high frame rate, a refresh rate is really good for gaming. So, you know, I'd spend the extra 300 bucks. And the C4 has probably a better processor, which would be a good thing. Which goes back to the question that was asked before about whether it's better to do the upscaling in the source device or in the TV. If you have a B4, I would guess that the better upscaling is going to be done in the source device. If you have a C4, it would be more of a question mark. I wouldn't know. I could very well be. The C4 would have the better upscaler. So that is the answer to that question, as far as I know. Let's see, I've probably gone a fair distance away. Ozark chief says it's digital music all the way for me. Yeah, me too. Rusty Bone says I agree on analog. Okay. Don't know whether you agree that you prefer it or you prefer digital. Ozark Chief FLAC files from title. Yes, exactly. Flac. I forgot what the F stands for, but it's lossless audio coding. So here's another thing about digital audio. It gets compressed. It has to because it's too big otherwise for. Certainly for streaming. So you can either compress it with lossy compression, which means you eliminate up to 90% of the audio information. And presumably that's inaudible. But there have been tests to show that no, it's audible or at least detectable, discernible, or there's loss less. You can compress it by about 50%, by about half, and you can regain every bit of information that was there before. The compression flack is that is that type of compression. And so I actually listened to. I use another. Tidal is one. Tidal is one service that provides lossless audio. I use another one called Qobuz Q, O, B, U, Z, based in France. They're both. They're both good. I prefer cobas because they tell you exactly what the Resolution of the audio is on each track. You know, I'm a geek, I want that information. So let's see here. Nova Novis, Nick says, have you seen core DAC pricing C H O R E no, but I'll bet you they are hell expensive. Really expensive. Michael Grove says, what do subwoofers help receivers with? Ah, great question. Subwoofers are speakers that reproduce only the low frequencies of audio. So virtually all main speakers cannot reproduce all the way down to the bottom of human hearing range. The human hearing range bottoms out at about 20Hz. Theoretically it goes up to 20Khz. Most of us that are older than babies can't hear up to 20 kilohertz. As we age, the top end of hearing drops. But we, we can hear 20 hertz, almost anybody can, except somebody with, with pretty bad hearing damage. And even if you can't hear it, you can feel it. But there are so few main speakers that would be called full range speakers that can reproduce 20 to 20 kilohertz and they're really, really expensive. Another example of analog technology being expensive because speakers are inherently analogous. So the, so your main speakers probably don't reproduce down to 20 hertz. They might go down to, to 50 maybe, if they're good. So how do you get from 50 down to 20 hertz? You need to add a subwoofer. A big subwoofer doesn't have to be big, but a subwoofer, the, the driver, the speaker driver in a subwoofer has to be fairly big. They're typically no smaller than 8 inches. I've seen some at 6, but at 10 or 12 or 15 inches diameter, the diameter of the big circular driver that can get down to 20Hz, you also need a lot of power because the way that hearing, human hearing works, we are less sensitive to lower frequencies. As the frequency goes down and down and down, it has to be low, it has to be louder or have more level before we even perceive it. So subwoofers often have a thousand watts of power or more just for that. So the larger the driver, the lower it can get generally, although there are tricks on how they're designed. But anyway, it's really great to add a subwoofer to a speaker system. And most AV receivers have a subwoofer output. And what you do in the receiver is you set the crossover and the crossover is which frequencies are going to go to the main speakers and which frequencies are going to go to the subwoofer. The THX Classic crossover point is 80Hz. So anything above 80 goes to the main speakers and anything below 80 goes to the subwoofer. So that's they're very important. In fact, you hear, you hear of Systems that are 5.1 or 7.1, that 0.1 is the subwoofer. And it's really, really important for a good audio experience. With movies, certainly there are audiophiles who believe that you should hear that you should have full range speakers, that the subwoofers should be where the speakers are and you should have two of them. And some audiophile companies make speakers with subwoofers built in. Those could be called full range speakers. There are other reasons to that. I don't prefer that primarily it's often better to be able to locate the subwoofer that is the source of the low frequencies somewhere other than where the main speakers are. And that has to do with room acoustics. So if you have your subwoofers in your main speakers, you don't have any option to locate them somewhere else where they might actually perform better and you'll perceive them better. So that's why I generally don't prefer full range speakers. Let's see, Novo Nis says you seem to need to listen to an actual good rig. No snap, crackle or pop. The record is easily damaged though. Yes, it is. And I've listened to some really good rigs. I have. I've listened to Michael Frammer's rig. I've listened to a number of others that are really, really good and cost an arm and a leg. I. And you know, if you treat your records really carefully, sure, maybe you can avoid the snap, crackle and pop, but I still prefer that. Preferred prefer digital. JC asks what's up with the Bravia 5 disappointing ratings review? Significantly less HDR brightness than the X90L. I hadn't read that. I have to go look at Art Ratings. They're my favorite TV review site. I was really looking forward to a 98 inch Sony. Yeah, I don't blame you for that. Wow, that's really surprising to me actually. Significantly less HDR brightness than the X90L, which is two or three years old now. I'll have to go look at that review. Thanks for, for pointing that out. What? The last time I looked at ratings they had not published their BRAVIA 5 review yet. And I believe there was a show. I did a show, a home Theater geeks episode a few episodes ago where somebody wrote in and asked about Bravia 7 or Bravia 5. And at that time the prices were almost no different between the two. And so I said, get a Bravia 7. Yes, it doesn't come in a 98 inch size, but it's brighter and yes, it's a year older. I don't worry about that. And, and I recommended to get the seven. And so here's maybe another reason to do that. Let's see here. Remember K Tail records, the first play on cassette? Because those hit collections were not lasting on that vinyl. Kate, I sort of remember K Tel records. I never. I never had any myself. Bite for Bite. The issue is also with aspect ratio. Oh, good point. IMAX movies are often not released in their normal aspect ratio, but rather 2.35 to 1, which is a bummer. Dune is a good example. Exactly. So movies that are shot on IMAX cameras for IMAX theaters often have not only one aspect ratio, but more than one. They switch between them. And the reason for that is that the IMAX, the large IMAX screens have an aspect ratio of 1.9 to 1, which is taller than a 2.35 to 1 screen. But that's, that's the aspect ratio of IMAX film. And that's what even IMAX digital cameras. Alexa, Alexa Arri makes those and others probably too. And so some directors, Chris Nolan being one of them and Denis Villeneuve who made Dune is another, they like to shoot for imax. And sometimes they do this weird thing. It's not weird, it's. It's artistic. Where they have a 2, 3, 5 aspect ratio for some of the movie. But then when they want to really impress you, they go to a 1.9. And on a giant 1.9 IMAX screen, that's very impressive. It's like, whoa. And in any other theater it stays at 2.35 the whole time, so you don't get that wow effect. And I think, I'm pretty sure that some discs are released of movies that are shot that way and showed that way in imax that'll do that. There's this program called Enhanced for IMAX that some receivers follow and some projectors, I think, and TVs that will do that, that will automatically do that aspect ratio shifting. And it's a good thing. If you really like those movies that are shot in imax. Bite for Byte. Oh, we're talking about blu rays triple layer 100 gigabyte disks. Yes, but I would be willing to bet that some players don't know what to do with those. Nick mitrus says recent 4k releases for old movies are using AI. Why Terminator 2 most recently was not a great 4k release. Well, that's interesting. I didn't know about, I didn't know about Terminator 2 being released in 4K. I'm sorry that it wasn't a good Release. Now, Terminator 2 I would be willing to bet was shot on film. And if so, they could have just rescanned the film at 4K and it wouldn't have been a problem. Maybe. What? And I don't know, I don't know this, but you're saying that maybe using AI to upscale. They're doing it so they have a scan at 2K 1080p for Blu Ray and they want to upscale it to 4k. The good way to do it, the real way to do it, is to rescan the film at 4K. But they, maybe they don't want to go through that trouble. And they say, oh well, AI can do it. And so AI does all the interpolation. You know, you have many more pixels. What's in those pixels? Well, AI presumably can, can do it, can determine what's supposed to be in those pixels. But what if it doesn't do a very good job? Apparently it didn't in this case. So that's a bummer. I'm, I'm, I'm sad to hear that. I would rather them, especially a movie like Terminator 2, the best terminator movie in my opinion. They should have just rescanned the film. That's what I would have done. Oh, rusty bones, great question. I have listened to high dollar setups and sometimes I wonder if the cost invested is biasing the listener. Yes, indeed. This is a very good question. You know, if you spend $10,000 on your cables, you. You better damn believe, better damn well believe that those cables sound better than, you know, hundred dollar monster cables. There is definitely an element of bias here in this whole high dollar audio file setup. There have been a few people who have done blind A B comparisons where the listeners didn't know which was which. There's a famous story about pair cables. There's a company that makes these really, really expensive cables and, and the great Randy, what was his name? It was a magician. Somebody in the chat room will remind me. He was a great debunker of myths and fallacies. And he put up a million dollars for anybody who could prove beyond a reason, beyond doubt in a blind A B test that that really expensive cables sounded better than, quote unquote, normal cables. This company Pair actually started to make overtures toward trying to set up a test. But it. It didn't work. It cra. They crapped out for some reason. I don't remember the details. I wish I did. And so that the test was never done, but would be interesting to know. I would be surprised if there was a. A repeatable, reliable difference. Let's see. Soup. Mars 7:73 says thank you for everything you do. You're very welcome. What do you think about Kaleidoscape? Do you think it's worth it over physical media collection? Well, that's another great question. Kaleidoscape, for those of you who don't know, is a company that makes a system that includes a very large storage device, a media server, terabytes of storage, and a player, a smaller device that plays the data from that server onto your tv. And they offer, they have a store, an online store. You can download movies from the store that are no more compressed than Blu Rays or Uhd Blu Rays. They're the same quality as the physical media. And you can download any number you want. I mean, you pay for them and you store them on your media drive server locally and you can play them. And it has a great user interface where it puts up all the movies in a grid on your TV and you can scroll through them and move around in them. It's a beautiful system, A beautiful system, but it ain't cheap. It's really quite expensive. And they've made recent forays into being more affordable. Their latest player media player, which is called the Strato, I believe they're one of their latest ones is like 4, 000 bucks. And they did another one even more recently that might be even less. And you know, but that, but the terabytes of storage, that ain't cheap. That's called the Terra T E R R A. So it's a beautiful system. It works wonderfully. It's the same quality as a Blu Ray or an Ultra HD Blu ray, but it's really expensive. Much more expensive than buying the discs. Plus, I believe, I do believe they have the extra material. One of, one of the reasons I prefer physical media to streaming is the bonus material. Now, some people might look at bonus material and go, I don't care about that. Okay? I do. I watch the making of featurettes about a movie and the interviews with the director. I don't normally watch the movie with the commentary on that takes me out of the movie kind of. But I do like the extra bonus materials that come on discs that you don't get from streaming. I'm pretty sure Kaleidoscape does offer you all of that material. I'm not 100 sure about that, but I think they do. Kaleidoscape is the system that is used at all the trade shows, ces, Cedia, everywhere. When they're doing demos, they're doing it from a Kaleidoscape, no question. And Kaleidoscape is found in a ton of home theater systems, but they're all pretty high end, so. Ozark chief. Yes, Chord. I'm sorry, I didn't. I, I should have realized. Chord. Dac, C, H, O, R, D. He was talking about a. He misspelled chord. That's a very high end digital to audio converter. Very high end and very expensive. And it's something that an audiophile would want because they can't get away, you can't get away from digital audio to some degree or another unless all you listen to is vinyl or reel to reel tape. There, there are audio files that still listen to reel to real tape. So if that's all you listen to, you don't need a dac, but you're going to have some digital audio from somewhere. And Chord makes some really, really high end ones. Let's see. Byte for Byte says, yeah, I, I listen to Apple music, which I assume is a lack. Which is Apple lossless audio codec. Yes, that's, that's correct. And as long as the lossless codec isn't doing anything weird, it's going to reproduce the entire music file exactly as it was originally presented. Let's see. Bite for Byte says I prefer the UI user interface to Spotify and it's bundled in my Apple one subscription. Great. Good for the good. That's good. Nova Novis, Nick says, is responding to Rusty bones. I own both streaming, I guess, and, and physical media. It's a mood exhaustion thing. I'm beat and tired. Stream great. Great mood and relaxing and relaxed. Analog. Or if I don't own it and I'm looking for some new music, I'll hunt via streaming. Okay, so you're talking about digital versus analog here. Okay, there was a, there was an experiment done and I wish I had the link to it. I don't, but I've heard about it a number of times where they put, they, they, they put test subjects into an MRI machine and they played digital music, highly compressed digital music like MP3 and uncompressed digital music. So this isn't digital versus analog, but it's similar. And they found that the highly compressed music activated the emotion center of the brain much less than the uncompressed music. And this, I suspect, might be something about what people talk about of analog sounds warmer. It could possibly be that digital activates the emotional center of the brain one way and analog another. It's possible. I don't know. I do know that there was an experiment done and highly compressed, highly compressed digital music did not activate the emotional center of the brain nearly as much as uncompressed digital music. So I found that fascinating. Silvara. Yes, getting old is lame. I totally agree. Oh yeah, Silvara here Sundays, I'm turning 45 in August. What a youngster. And honestly, other than the refresh rate differences, I don't notice much difference between 1080p and 4k. There's my point exactly. Now if you were to sit closer to the screen, you would see a difference. But most of us sit 8, 9, 10ft away. The average is 10ft. And at 10ft you would need a screen, you know, 100 inches big or more. I don't remember the exact number, but it would have to be huge in order to see the difference between 1080p and 4k and 8k. That would have to be humongous. Evanescence Photography says keep your plasma TV well. Yes, plasma was great. It was great. I loved my Pioneer Coral plasma, but it would be no more than hd. More importantly, it would not have high dynamic range. High dynamic range, in my opinion, is far more important than increasing the number of pixels. Far more important. A good high dynamic range image shown on a good HDR display. Beautiful. Just beautiful. Bite for bite. I feel like the audiophiles haven't heard of the law of diminishing returns. Exactly. Exactly. Here's a. Here's something I've said for many, many years. Generally speaking, not strictly speaking, but generally speaking, the more money you spend, the better the quality you're going to get up to a point. Once you get to that point, the curve of price to performance starts to level off. And as it levels off, you can spend tons more money to get a tiny increment improvement in performance. So my recommendation overall is to find that what's called the knee point, K N E E the knee point, which is where the curve starts to flatten out. You're going to get your best value, your best bang for the buck. If you buy a product that sits near that knee point. If you can't afford that, you can go down the down the curve and you'll get less performance for less money. You can still find good deals, good value. But finding something at that knee point is the epitome, the optimum way to get the most bang for buck Evanescence Photography do you get the sense that Plasma TVs are going through a bit of a renaissance? I've decided to dump the LCDs in the house. With the exception of the X90L we'd learned at the beginning of this show, the Bravia 5 isn't isn't up to its brightness replaced with an older Pioneer. Sure, Absolutely. I don't know that they're going through a renaissance exactly. And as I said before, the main problem is they don't do high dynamic range. But they sure look good. Okay, let's we have time for one more question and I'm going to look at Bite for Byte. Disney plus does the aspect ratio switch as well? I love it. If I'm shelling out good money for a disc, I should get the best experience across the board. Couldn't agree with you more. Bite for Bite. That is exactly right. If you're shelling out money, you should get the best you can for that money. Charlie White says Dark Knight Blu Ray has a variable aspect ratio. I guess that's true. They were that was shot for imax. So yes, I will leave you with this. Getting the best value for your money is the ideal. And as I said a moment ago, finding that knee point on the Graph of Price vs. Performance is the best way to do that. But otherwise you want to look for for things like, you know, does it change aspect ratios? You might not always know until you buy, might say so on the package. But if you're streaming, who knows? That's. That's a real good question. Disney plus Bite for Byte says does do that when necessary and maybe other streamers do too. But the main thing is to just keep your eyes and ears open and learn as much as you can and listen to and watch this show for more information about all of that. And I I'm dedicated to educating the watchers and listeners to this show the best I can to get the most out of their money and the most enjoyment they can out of their systems. So thanks to everyone in the chat room. This has been a really great, great and fun time for me. And it seems like it happened to go well. And that means I will surely do it again at some point. So keep your eyes and ears out for that now. Meanwhile, if you have a question for me, you can shoot it my way to ScottWit TV. I'm sorry? HTGWit TV. That would be the email to use and I will answer as many as I can right here on the show. And as you know by now, all of Twitch shows are available for free on YouTube but with ads. If you want to go ad free, join the club. Go to Twit TV Club Twit and join up today. Until next time, geek out.
