home theater

Scott joins Rich to talk about an issue connecting a tape deck to a modern AV receiver with no tape in/tape out option. Scott says older receivers had that feature to record and playback certain AV signals. But that went away about 20 years ago. No receiver that Scott knows supports that anymore. With modern streaming, nobody really records anymore. But with certain receivers, including the Marantz NR1509, you can still record it. Look for a preamp out or pre-out port. 

Scott answers questions this week. One reader is having the issue that he can't see his 4K AppleTV on his one HDMI port, but will on his other port. Scott says that some of those HDMI inputs operate at the highest possible bandwidth of 18GB per second, while the others operate at 10.2 GB per second. 4K will not work at 10.2GB per second, so chances are, the reader is plugging it into the wrong port. You may also need to go into the settings an tell the TV to stream at the highest bandwidth. This is due to manufacturers wanting to be as compatible as possible with legacy equipment.

Scott joins Leo to answer a question about subwoofers. Dan bought a pair of subwoofers to go with his speaker system. Scott says that proper positioning of your subwoofer can make all the difference when setting up your home theater speakers, and these days, having two subwoofers is a good thing. But they also take up a lot of space. So, he's selling his speakers to get bookshelf models. Scott recommends listing them on AudioGon.com. It's designed to specifically sell your audio/video equipment. Another option is AVSForum.com.

Scott Wilkinson joins to talk about CES, which is just around the corner in January. The big thing will likely be an advancement in microLED TV technology. There may also be the launch in ATSC 3.0. ATSC stands for Advanced, Television Systems Committee, and it's the standard for digital transmission over the air. ATSC 3 is the next generation, skipping over 2.0. Kinda weird, but there you go. It'll be 4K capable, and offer an online IP standard.

Next week, Scott is going to see Ang Lee's new movie Gemini Man, starring Will Smith. It's salient because Lee has shot it at 120 fps 3D and in IMAX. High frame rate has also created a debate in the film community about just how realistic an image should look and still be considered "cinema." It's also shot in 3D, which Scott says hasn't really been popular lately. Then on top of that, Will Smith is battling a younger version of himself, where the actor was de-aged. He'll join Leo next week with his review.

Scott saw some content on a Samsung 8K TV last week, and he sat about one screen height away from the image (it's best at 1 1/2 times). It was so good he could barely see the pixels. Very sharp. The problem is, there is no real native 8K content, and probably won't be for a while. And Scott says that while the resolution was impressive, he couldn't see much of a difference between it and uncompressed 4K UHD blu-ray. But Scott says that the upscaling is where 8K really is at right now.