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Gossip&News Feedback Industry News Vanishing CD Players It’s been true for a long time that CD players have been disappearing. Go into a Best Buy and ask where the CD players are. If the “associate” is young, he won’t even know what you mean. We rather anticipate that they’ll soon be vanishing from shelves of audiophile stores too, and indeed that may already be happening. Bryston BCD-1 player, which has been drawing plenty of attention (it was reviewed in UHF No. 82), has been discontinued. It’s not really because it wasn’t selling. Like many (indeed most) high end makers of players, Bryston was using Philips transports. A model that Philips no longer makes. That puts companies like Bryston in a peculiar position. In many countries, including Canada, manufacturers are required to offer spare parts for their products during a certain period of time. Philips sells to OEM customers through an intermediary, thus exempting itself from the requirement. But the high end manufacturers are bound by the laws. Thus Bryston has a certain number of these now discontinued transports, but will put them aside to service units that fail. One reason that Philips is used by so many companies is that most of its competitors have gotten out of a shrinking market. Philips is bound to do the same. Anyone still making an audiophile-grade CD player that doesn’t have digital inputs has to be seeing the writing on the wall. Let us repeat something we’ve been saying. We don’t think the physical disc is going to vanish just yet, and we’ll get to the reasons in a moment. The players are another matter. 78 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine TV Doldrums Didn’t we write about this in our last issue? We did indeed. But there’s lots more happening in videoland, and it isn’t all good news. For anybody. But perhaps Samsung is doing a little better than anyone else. Samsung’s European sales director Michael Zoeller was at a press conference in Dubrovnik (you should see our airline bill!), and let slip that at the Berlin IFA in August, his company will be launching a new “superluxury TV.” What does that mean? That was all he would say. And no, apparently, it is not an OLED set (that one was shown at CES in January), though it too will be in IFA. So what does “super luxury” mean? The buzz says it will be a 4K set, with 2160-line resolution. That, by the way, is stretching the meaning of 4K, which originally meant four times as many pixels as HDTV in each dimension, and thus 16 times more pixels. The new “4K” sets being shown by such companies as Sharp and LG use the new definition. Not that you should expect 4K source material just yet, unless you own a cinema chain. Oh, yes, rumors continue to flow, predicting that Apple plans to swim against the current and launch its own TV set, with what Steve Jobs had described as having “the simplest user interface you can imagine.” Believable? No? Yet some people continue to believe it. A poll, by two companies called KAE and Toluna (whatever!) indicates that 25% of US consumers would buy an Apple television set if it came out, and 30% in the economically-embattled UK. And that’s for the general population! For people who already know Apple because they own an Apple product, the intention to buy rises to 38% in the US and 43% in the UK. Let’s see…what’s 30% of the population of Great Britain? In the meantime, Samsung (them again) opined that an eventual Apple television wouldn’t be as good as Samsung’s own in picture quality. We’re prepared to agree, impressed as we are with Samsung TV’s (a Samsung plasma is our reference), but there’s another rumor that says Samsung will be the supplier for Apple! Call your bookie! Then there’s Sony, which has just anointed a new CEO, Kazuo Hirai (above), to replace the hapless Sir Howard Stringer. The company has fallen on hard times, being beaten or threatened by Apple on everything from music players to game platforms to computers. It is now worth about 3% of Apple’s own value. Hirai vows his company will rebound. Perhaps he’ll begin by dumping the company’s current slogan, which is “Make Believe.” Sony once made the world’s best TV sets, but for years has been making rather dowdy LCD panels. And losing money at it. Now Sony is cutting its costs by finding a supplier that can sell it TV panels for less. The supplier? Yes...Samsung! Them again. Philips has seen better days as well, with such unsuccessful TV sets as the much-too-wide 21:9 set shown above. Journalists at CES often skip the venerable company’s TV presentations, and so Philips won’t make them anymore. So there! Oh, there will still be Philips-branded sets, by a new company called TP Vision,
eing formed with Hong Kong’s TPV Technology. New televisions created by the venture will be developed, manufactured and marketed by TP Vision, but will be badged Philips. The new CEO of TP Vision, Maarten de Vries, says that his new company “will continue to bring the high level of innovation consumers expect from a Philips TV.” Oh? Do we still expect it? Does this sound like a good time to be getting into the TV business? Guess who thinks it is… Of course IKEA sells more than Billy bookcases. Its stores stock Ikea-branded stoves and refrigerators too. Next? TV sets. Oh, it won’t make them by themselves, they have a partner. And no, it’s not Samsung, it’s TCL Multimedia of Hong Kong. TCL makes RCA sets among others, though we can’t recall seeing them anywhere fancier than Walmart. IKEA is also, you may have heard, planning to build an entire model community in the UK. Perhaps it will come with a little hex key. Faux 3D (the Beat Goes On) What’s been holding back the growth of home 3D? Well, there’s the fact that a lot of people are still paying off their 2D HDTV’s. There’s the fact that both the quality and the quantity of 3D material leaves something to be desired. And then there are the dorky glasses. So here’s Stream Networks, with its Ultra-D technology, designed to solve both the supply and the glasses problems. Just in time…if it works. We might as well say that the image shown here would be misleading even if it applied to real 3D, but it doesn’t. We can’t do better than by quoting the company’s claim from its Web site (the abusive use of upper case letters is theirs): Ultra-D is a proprietary 3D technology (viewing without glasses) that can be used for PCs, Picture Frames, Tablets, TVs and other displays; How Maggie Revolutionary Works tablets (Android based UHF and Windows is, and has based); beenSet Top Boxes with Browsers for many for connecting years, the web to TVs. a (Non-consumer print magazine. applications But we know of the technology more are enormous and more as they audiophiles can apply to medical, military want and to read many it other on their industrial fields.) computer or iPad. And they’re Sure, we willing can see to the save military money jumping too. on a system Click that here, adds and bogus let “3D” Maggie information to explain perfectly how good to images. get the full We’re told it costs a lot version of money for to $4. “convert” 2D to 3D, and And here’s we mean a set-top a PDF box that does it on version the fly. without Or not. digitl rights We management have no plans you to test can the transfer Ultra-D to system, for the the device same of reason your we choice. have no plans to test perpetual motion machines. (And perpetual motion isn’t dead. At CES, we got an invitation to drop by and recharge our cell phone on a system that uses water as fuel. You can’t make this stuff up. Or at least we can’t, though clearly some people can.) Also on the faux 3D front, James Cameron, who accelerated the current taste for the third dimension with his hugely successful Avatar, gave in to the commercial lure, and “converted” his hit film Titanic to 3D. Now if there’s someone who should know that fake 3D is not 3D, you’d think it’s Cameron, because he has been so harsh on previous faux 3D movies. But hey, the 100 th anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking was in April, the newspapers and the Web were filled with Titanic lore, as were the bookstores, and a 3D re-release could only be a success. So how did Cameron do it? Actually the conversion was done by a company called Stereo D, using computers to draw new scenes, essentially making up new backgrounds. The painstaking process, which cost some $18 million, and which Cameron described as being like mowing the lawn with nail clippers, was eased by the fact that many scenes had been computergenerated anyway.. The problem — and we’ve pointed this out before — is that in a real 3D movie people and objects have “roundness.” In converted films, you see flat people and flat objects, some closer than others. We could call it 2.1D. Cameron says that, with scenes showing the Titanic itself, he had to rein in his team and reduce the amount of added 3D, because otherwise the ship looked like a miniature. Yes, but it was a miniature, wasn’t it? Samsung Adopts Tubes Well, why not? There is a booming business in making boomboxes for use with iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices. The DA-E750 is a nifty-looking miniature sound system, whose top-mounted round window gives you a glimpse of its glowing tubes. The tubes, by the way, are for the $800 device’s preamplifier section. The three amplifiers (including one for the “powerful” subwoofer) are solid state. ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine 79 Gossip&News Feedback
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