CATEGORIES

BINANCE MISHANDLED FUNDS AND VIOLATED SECURITIES LAWS, ACCORDING TO SEC LAWSUIT

The world's largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao are accused of misusing investor funds, operating as an unregistered exchange and violating a slew of U.S. securities laws in a lawsuit filed by the SEC.

DNA SUCKED INTO AIR FILTERS CAN REVEAL WHAT PLANTS AND ANIMALS ARE NEARBY

DNA is all around us even in the air we breathe. Now scientists have found that air quality monitoring stations - which pull in air to test for pollution - also pick up lots of DNA that can reveal what plants and animals have been in the area.

MONEY STORED IN VENMO AND OTHER PAYMENT APPS COULD BE VULNERABLE, FINANCIAL WATCHDOG WARNS

Customers of Venmo, PayPal and CashApp should not store their money with those apps for the long term because the funds might not be safe during a crisis, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warned.

Vision Pro

THE DAWN OF SPATIAL COMPUTING

Miyajima Laboratory Wo-1 - PREAMPLIFIER

A phenomenon formerly unique to Japan, which in recent years has been emulated in cities around the world, is the jazz café (known as jazz kissa in Japan), where salarymen can find respite from their hectic lives, loosen their ties, and enjoy hi-fi jazz over coffee or a drink.'

SPIN DOCTOR - Swiss precision

In 1928, Swiss engineer and inventor Jean-Léon Reutter created a clock that could run for years without human interaction or any type of external power source. The Atmos Clock required no AC power, batteries, solar panels, or hand-winding. It was able to wind itself by leveraging subtle changes in atmospheric pressure and temperature.

Living Sounds Audio Discovery Warp 1 - POWER AMPLIFIER

It takes a while for audio-related technologies to mature. Tubed amplifiers were invented by Lee de Forest in the nineteen-teens, but while there are still some adherents of early high-distortion triode designs, the age of mainstream high-fidelity amplification dawned with higher-power/lower-distortion amplifiers developed by Williamson and McIntosh followed by the Ultralinear take on the Williamson concept.

BRILLIANT CORNERS - Come Hell or High Water

New York is an ugly city, a dirty city,\" John Steinbeck wrote in 1953. \"But there is one thing about it-once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.\" Decades later, the novelist's insight about this appalling, incomparable city still feels true.

Bowers & Wilkins 705 S3 - LOUDSPEAKER

Over a lifetime of involvement in audio, I have had stand-mount speakers-bookshelf speakers, as they were called back then-only twice.

RE-TALES - Succession

Many family-owned hi-fi companies have experienced generational leadership transitions over the last few years: Wilson Audio, Von Schweikert Audio, PS Audio, and VPI Industries, to name a few. In two of those cases, the founding father is still around. One of those is VPI Industries.

GRAMOPHONE DREAMS - An affordable purist amplifier with punch

It was a cold March-in-Brooklyn morning. Clouds had been shedding wintery mix since daybreak. By 9am, birds were flash-mobbing my window, demanding suet. But I was frozen-unable to pull my mind loose from the grave flowings of American composer Ned Rorem's Book of Hours, as performed by Les Connivences Sonores on the album Musikalische Perlen (24/48 FLAC, Ars Produktion/Qobuz). The sounds in my room were sensuous and mesmerizing, and I needed to float in their mysterious energy as long as I could.

Antipodes Oladra - SERVER/STREAMER/RECLOCKER

Servers, servers, servers. How we who embrace digital hi-fi love them for their potential to make files and streams sound better (more alive, vital, musical, moving, transparent) than music served from a computer.

Thank You, Douglas Mandel

Recently, I described how a certain airline has devised a fiendish way to torment its passengers. That is, a type of torment beyond the usual runof-the-mill torture of flying on any airplane. In a letter to the editor, alert reader Douglas Mandel commiserated with me but pointed out that I was overlooking another kind of torture that is much, much worse.

Netflix By Mail Ends Its 25-Year Run

Once as ubiquitous as a Blockbuster plastic bag, the Netflix envelope defined the era between video cassettes and streaming. Subscribers to the disc-by-mail service were informed in April that the company will ship its last disc on September 29, 2023. The announcement, coming 25 years after Netflix gave new life to First Class Mail, was seismic but not surprising.

Visual Brilliance

IT IS amazing how rapidly TVs have grown in capability while their prices have dropped, defying inflation. I am very familiar with TCL's 6-Series and remember its first U.S. market iteration.

Headphone Heaven

THEY SAY money can't buy happiness. Without a doubt, it can buy the $999 Mark Levinson No. 5909 headphones, and without a doubt, these make me happy.

Bright and Bold

THIS IS the third edition of LG's Gallery Edition OLED, replacing last year's 65-inch, G2 (reviewed in the August/ September 2022 Sound & Vision and also at Sound & Vision.com).

I SEE YOU

How James Cameron and his Visual Effects Team Create an Otherworldly Reality in Avatar: The Way of Water

Affordable Amplification

AUDIO AMPLIFIERS have but one task: take an electrical signal and make it more powerful without changing its character.

Hidden Bass

RENOWNED FOR their expertise in crafting high-performance subwoofers, SVS has carved a niche for itself within the home theater and music system communities.

Studio Quality

HOW DO you know when an audio trend is more than just a bandwagon? When America's oldest hi-fi brand climbs on board. (Yes, I know that JBL and Klipsch were both founded in 1946. But JBL's earliest incarnation goes back to the 1930's.)

Juke Audio Multiroom Streaming Amplifier

A Simple Streaming Solution

New World Mix

Producer/engineer Richard Chycki shares the spatially motivated secrets behind his Dolby Atmos mix of Rush's sonically transitional 1982 album, Signals.

Sofabaton X1 Remote - Out of Control

When Logitech stopped making Harmony remotes in 2021, few options remained. The Sofabaton X1, with its vast database of codes for TVs and other devices, sounded promising. If you want a single remote and are willing to invest time to set it up, you may get what you need but it's not a substitute for what it's intended to replace.

Ultra Short Throw Projectors

Ultra Short Throw (UST) projectors have steadily increased in performance while also massively decreasing in price. My first UST experience was a Sony model at CES several years ago selling for $20,000. Today you can get a UST projector with 4K HDR resolution and a laser-light engine rated for a 20,000-hour lifespan that is capable of producing 2500+ lumens for under $2500!

AURAL EXCELLENCE

THE NEW Dymension DM70 Tower speaker is an evolution of a design that's signature Definitive Technology.

REVINYLIZATION - OJC rises (yet) again

Liner notes from jazz albums of the 1950s and 1960s can be shot through with naivete, hipsterism (usually faux), and callousness toward the abundance of musical talent then working. Few though are as shortsighted as the original essay by Jack Maher on the back of 1960's Workin' with the Miles Davis Quintet. Opening with \"Miles Davis is the most maligned and idolized musician in modern American jazz today.

AURAL ROBERT - Elton's Magic Year

In 1973, Elton John and Bernie Taupin capped one of pop music's most epic periods of sustained creativity by writing, recording, and releasing the 10-track single disc Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player and the 17-track double album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, both of which are now celebrating their 50th anniversary. As two of the strongest entries among the many classics that make 1972-73 the peak years for rock albums, both went #1 in the US and UK and arguably stand as the dual highpoints of John's recorded legacy.

JAZZ AT A DARK MOMENT

THIS YEAR'S SAN JOSE JAZZ WINTER FEST HAD MEANING BEYOND MUSIC.

HiFi Rose RS520 - STREAMING INTEGRATED AMPLIFIER

My first car was a decrepit, mustard-yellow Peugeot 304 with a navy hood. The blue hue wasn't a fashion statement; after an accident, the previous owner had gone to a salvage yard where only a blue replacement could be procured.