The Best for Show Reporting

Coverage of HI-FI '99 from Chicago, USA -- May 12-16, 1999

The most obvious change at this show was the continuing increase in the number of HDTV products being demonstrated. Most all of them remain front-projection or rear-projection systems using 7" or 9" CRTs. All but one of the HDTV demos incorporated the now ubiquitous "Sencore box," which stores HDTV programming on an internal hard disc and plays it back like a random-access digital HDTV VCR.

Only the Dolby Digital HDTV demo included an actual live HDTV broadcast signal. In this case, the signal originated from Echostar’s DISH Network (decoder shown right). A temporary roof-top dish received the satellite signal, which traveled though 750 feet of coax and multiple signal amplifiers before it reached the room where the Dolby Digital presentation took place. Dolby Digital’s interest in all of this center’s on Dolby Digital being the digital audio format specified in the HDTV specification. Dolby Digital reminded everyone at the presentation that Dolby Digital is a digital audio format with any number of audio channels from 1 to 5.1. The creator of the programming decides how many channels of sound to deliver with the programming. DVD movies almost all use a 5.1 Dolby Digital soundtrack. However, for broadcast HDTV programming, whoever creates the programming is free to select one, two, four, five, or 5.1 channels of sound.

Plasma screens from a number of companies were prominently on display -- Philips, Marantz, Pioneer (shown left), JVC, and others were all there. These all produced better images than we have ever seen from plasma screens before; however, blacks remain gray, giving images a distinctly low-contrast appearance, almost a milky character compared to the best direct-view and projection systems. Prices for Plasma screens are not plummeting precipitously; most remain in the $10,000 to $20,000 price range. However, these things are exceptionally cool-looking devices, like pieces of industrial art that at times we could almost forgive the lack of true blacks. Plasma screens were shown both hanging on a wall and resting on a flat surface with a compact pedestal stand.

Rear-projection HDTV sets are getting better and better, but we can’t select an overall winner from this show. The one set that may have taken the title was Pioneer’s Elite HDTV set. However, the unit on display was the same that has been traveling from show to show since late in 1998, and it is showing some effects of a hard life on the road, primarily in some color fringing on leading and trailing edges of moving objects. However, when the image was moving only very slowly, the image and color were simply stunning. The Pioneer set also exhibited the most uniform edge-to-edge brightness. All the other HDTV rear-projection sets we saw had distinctly hotter images in the center 1/3 of the picture area, with illumination dropping off annoyingly at the corners and left and right sides. When you spend $7000 or more on a video monitor, we think you ought to be able to expect illumination that is a lot more uniform than what most manufacturers were displaying.

Direct-view monitors, with only a few exceptions, broke no new ground at this show. Sony seemed to own direct-view market when exhibitors brought their own monitors for their demos: 35" XBR (KV series) and 35" WEGA sets were found in a number of suites. One of the exceptions was Samsung’s 40" 16:9 monitor (shown above), a very large device that we estimated must weigh 250 pounds or more. When we discovered that it weighed only 65 pounds, we were very surprised. There is no tube in this set; it has the biggest LCD panel we’ve ever seen. It was difficult to carefully evaluate the image quality, but it did not appear to encroach on the territory staked out by the best direct-view monitors and rear projectors. However, for someone who wants a big screen with good but not necessarily near-state-of-the-art image quality, this set could be it, especially if you are a mobile person who expects to move every year or two and who would find a 250-pound direct-view or rear-projection set completely unmanageable. The retail price of $3999 puts it within striking distance of the top-of-the-line direct-view sets and right in the middle of the non-HDTV rear-projection sets.

Tips to exhibitors on making your home-theater demos more impressive

• Louder is not better. We heard amplifiers clipping painfully in a large number of the home-theater demos we attended.
  
  
• Please learn from and use Joe Kane’s Video Essentials DVD. Again, a large number of the sets we saw were less than ideally tuned. Serious home-theater enthusiasts are going to write your efforts off as ineffectual and uninformed if you can’t get good image quality.
  
  
• Please get a grip on your bass, specifically on your subwoofers. Stop making 20Hz about 30dB louder than it should be, and stop using subwoofers that don't sound good playing music because a subwoofer that sounds good playing music will sound incredible in a home theater. Dialog won’t be masked and you’ll get all kinds of texture in explosions and crashes that home-theater subwoofers don’t reproduce.
  
  
• Video images that are so blue that the whites are blue-ish are a result of improperly set color temperature. Here again, Joe Kane’s Video Essentials DVD will educate you enough to set the color temperature properly on the majority of monitors out there. Personally. we wouldn’t use a monitor which doesn’t permit you to select a good 6500-degree color temperature using nothing more than a single button or setup-menu choice.

Lest everyone think we're just grumpy from five days of death-defying hotel hospitality, we genuinely appreciated the displays in customer-oriented suites where personnel treated us to demos that were in one or more ways most impressive. To these people, and we suspect you know who you are, we offer a big thanks.

The biggest video/multichannel surprises of the Show

The new budget loudspeakers from Pioneer were very impressive. A brief listen to the smallest of the main speakers using only music revealed silly-good sound for the money. Any speaker that sounds this good on music is going to be great for home theater too. Pioneer calls them ISO-drive loudspeakers because the baffle that the drivers are mounted on is isolated from the cabinet by three elastic posts. Getting the drivers isolated from the cabinet reduces cabinet resonances to a significant degree according to Pioneer. Those cabinet resonances are perhaps the main reason that it is so hard to make really good-sounding inexpensive loudspeakers.

The best image quality at the entire show was created with Ayre’s prototype modular DVD player into a 17" DEC personal computer monitor. No geometric distortion, no visible scan lines even at 8" viewing distance where the image fills your field of view about two times larger than 10’ screens from typical viewing distances. No edge artifacts, no interlace artifacts, no motion artifacts, perfectly even illumination over the entire screen, incredible color depth and a color palette that seemed to go on forever. This is the kind of image that ought to be every manufacturer’s standard for large-screen direct-views or projection sets. Ayre did not select this monitor for any particular reason; it just happened to be on an employee’s desktop, and they borrowed it for the Show to use in their small off-to-the-side demo in their shared room.

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