Now, clear your mind, relax your conscience, and just say the first thing that comes into your mind… Ready…? OK.

Name me some high-end audio/video gear.

Unless you are in this industry, chances are HIGH that you thought of Sony and Bose. Because — despite what your mom told you — you are not special and different and unique, but are rather very much like the vast majority of the population and you have been mind freaked by their big dollar ad spending. And while I have absolutely nothing against either of these companies, no one “in the know” would consider either of them to be high-end. (OK. That might not be so true about Sony on the video front. Their new 4K projector is the shizzit and the Crystal TV they showed got my coveted “Best of Show — Video” award at CES. So, if you were thinking of either of those products, then I’m giving you a gold star.)

For all its bluster and billions spent, the consumer electronics industry has really done a poor job of promoting itself, especially on the high-end. And while people will routinely purchase luxury items like $100 bottles of wine and First Class airline upgrades, they have a harder time understanding the benefits of the A/V luxury lifestyle.

In fact, most companies that are really considered to be performance leaders are totally unknown to the vast majority of people, even those that are looking to buy and actually capable of purchasing them. When introduced to a brand that has the equivalent pedigree of a Bentley, Rolex, or Viking, most people shrug their shoulders and say, “Huh? Never heard of ‘em. Do they sound as good as the Bose over there?” (And, for the record, no, they don’t sound anything at all like the Bose over there. The Bose is like listening to someone making music by grinding a bunch of rough chunks of concrete against a steel pot compared to what these systems sound like.)

So, I thought I would introduce you to some high-end manufacturers, and explain who they are… and who they are not.

In the electronics world, Wilson is not the volleyball from Castaway, rather the manufacturer of some truly stellar loudspeakers. Some of them kind of look like futuristic, angular, metallic samurai warriors (is it just me?) but it has to do with phasing and driver alignment and super stiff cabinet materials and driver exotica and whatnot.

Now people know who Onkyo is and what they do. What they don’t have a frickin’ clue of is how do pronounce the name of what is likely the most mis-pronounced name in the history of the audio/video universe. Seriously, ask 10 people how to say “Onkyo” and you’ll get at least 11 different answers. For the record, it is on-key-yo. Like, imagine if you are saying Don Quixote — you know, the wind-mill fighting guy — but without the D or the “ote” at the end. That’s how it sounds.

Macintosh is, err, or was, an Apple computer. McIntosh has been making highly desirable audio gear that engenders fanatical-like loyalty since 1949. They have some very cool, old-school faceplates with moving VU meters and nice big analog dials.

Click here to read plenty more examples of who these guys are, and who they are NOT.

Season two of Treme – David Simon’s brilliant look at post-Katrina New Orleans — arrives on Blu-ray from HBO April 17th. Both the music and cuisine of the Crescent City play an important role on the show and the Blu-
ray will include a number of extras devoted to each.

Exclusive to the Blu-ray edition is “Down in the Treme: A Look at the Music and Culture of New Orleans.” An in-episode viewing mode will provide information on the music, cuisine, and landmarks of the city.

“The Music of Treme” offers more information about the songs in each episode. The Blu-ray includes an enhanced, interactive feature for this content. Other featurettes include “Treme: Food for Thought” with New Orleans chef John Besh; “Behind Treme: Clarke Peters and the Mardi Gras Indians”; and “The Art of Treme,” devoted to a Tulane University symposium with David Simon, Eric Overmeyer, and Clarke Peters.

The set also has music commentaries on every episode by WBGO’s Josh Jackson and NPR Music’s Partick Jarenwattananon. There are also four audio commentaries featuring cast and crew, including David Simon, Nina Kostroff Noble, Anthony Hemingway, Brad Anderson, George Pelecanos, Blake Leyh, Clarke Peters, Rob Brown, Lucia Micarelli, and Wendell Pierce.

The Blu-ray will retail for $79.98. Treme will also be released on DVD ($59.99) and will be available as a digital download. Check back here closer to release date for an in-depth review.

If you’re not familiar with the show, do yourself a favor and catch up with season one on Blu-ray or HBO Go. Treme is always entertaining, but most often the show goes well beyond simple small-screen storytelling. Although fictional and scripted, Treme is at times a brutally honest look at a city and its residents struggling to recover from a terrible natural disaster. Other times, Treme is simply David Simon’s love letter to the rich history and traditions of a place in America that is unlike any other–and a chance for viewers to enjoy a little of that magic each week.

Amazon has the set available for pre-order.

In the final installment of our exclusive interview, Noel Lee, the Monster chief executive known as the Head Monster, talks to Dealerscope and CustomRetailer’s Krissy Rushing about the company’s new headphones. In this video, Lee talks about Monster’s headphone partnerships with Earth, Wind and Fire and Daft Punk.

[See the video link here.]

Face it, mobile payments, mobile advertising, price comparison apps and social commerce are quickly becoming the norm and will all play an essential role in how consumers shop for everything, from a simple accessory to a posh home. And with the state of the economy, high unemployment, unsure future and rising cost of everyday necessities, it’s a consumer’s responsibility to find the lowest price.

Instead of treating “showrooming” as an evil, sales associates should treat it as a blessing. When one sees a customer searching on a smartphone, they should view that as a golden opportunity to begin a conversation.  With a smile on their face, the associate should thank the customer for coming in, find out what he/she is searching for, take out their tablet and offer to help, match the lowest (legitimate) price, and talk about EVERYTHING the store AND its ecommerce site can offer that the competition can’t.

Read: [Dealerscope: "Showrooming" Can Be a Blessing]

I’m going to file this one under the header: “Who Knew?”

I picked up a Blu-ray Disc at Streetlight Records the other day that got me both excited and nervous. It contains a copy of one of my favorite Sci Fi movies, H.G. Wells’ Things To Come (a British film circa 1938) and two other films that I had not heard of before:  The Most Dangerous Game and She.  The package boasts colorized versions — supervised by none other than sci-fi animation legend Ray Harryhausen himself — as well as the original black & white versions. So I figured, if the colorization was lame, I still had the originals to enjoy. So I took a chance on it…

In the bonus features on the disc, Harryhausen reveals his thought process behind getting involved in this project, since he did not make these films.  In short, he had been working with Legend Films on the restoration of one of his early classics, 20 Million Miles to Earth, including the colorization of that landmark film.  His original intent in making that movie was in fact to shoot in color, but studio budgets were tight so they had no choice but to film it in black & white.

Movie poster for She, circa 1935, offers insights into the film's original color schemes

It’s a shame, because  Ray had a very clear idea of how the film was supposed to look in color — fortunately, 50 years later he clearly still has the clarity of mind and sight to oversee a proper colorization process.  I must say that it looks quite good and is very enjoyable.  This is not the uber-cheesy colorization from the early 90s.

Another very real dilemma faces the legacy of many older films today; simply put: many younger viewers just don’t like watching black & white movies! So colorization — for better or for worse — is a way to hopefully introduce a new generation to some great films while maintaining (ideally) the integrity of the original film.

Harryhausen apparently knew the creators of these other films, and knew they too wanted to shoot them in color but were budget constrained and forced into doing only black & white.   You can read more about the this in the original DVD release review at The NY Times.

Back to this two-fer Blu-ray Disc, to start we decided to watch one of the films we’d not seen before — and we watched it colorized from the get go! — and it was a fun experience.  She, it turns out, was the failed followup film from the director of King Kong, Merian C. Cooper.  This film — a quest for the fires of eternal life wrapped around a story of eternal love and reincarnation — has many of the spectacular hallmarks of King Kong coupled with themes akin to later adventure epics like Lost Horizon (released two years later in 1937) and Journey to the Center of the Earth (released nearly 25 years later in 1959)

But perhaps the coolest thing about this film is that we see a significant influence on none other than Walt Disney, who borrowed the look and feel of the Evil Queen in Snow White from this film.

The final scenes with her calling up the fires of eternal life bear some special effects that look fantastic and even spectacular in color! The way the Queen ages 500 years before the traveler’s eyes at the end is spooky and astounding.  This was 1935 folks!   The effects are still pretty outstanding even by current day CGI standards.   Check out some of the scenes in this trailer below.  Its impressive!

You should check out this film.  You can buy it new on Blu-ray Disc at Amazon for half of what I paid for it, so that is a no brainer right there.

In Part 2, I’ll take a look at the version of Things to Come that also resides on this Blu-ray Disc.

Stay tuned…

There are very few things I hate more than painting the house. I hate it so much that even non-theater rooms are painted in dark colors so they won’t show dirt, and I don’t have to do anything until it’s coming off the walls. What may give me a reason to repaint, however, is the new paint from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Made from a recycled material called ‘fly ash” and carbon nanotubes. When the cement-like substance dries, a very simple device can use it as a sensor web to detect changes in the stucture via changes in electrical charges. Not only is this cheap, but it’s far more practical in harsh climates, and deployable via a paint roller to virtually any building on the planet

Traditional methods of assessing large structures are complex, time consuming and use expensive instrumentation, with costs spiraling into millions of pounds each year.

However, the smart paint costs just a fraction of the cost and can be simply sprayed onto any surface, with electrodes attached to detect structural damage long before failure occurs.

Dr Mohamed Saafi, of the University’s Department of Civil Engineering, said: “The development of this smart paint technology could have far-reaching implications for the way we monitor the safety of large structures all over the world.

“There are no limitations as to where it could be used and the low-cost nature gives it a significant advantage over the current options available in the industry. The process of producing and applying the paint also gives it an advantage as no expertise is required and monitoring itself is straightforward.”

Check out all the latex-free details at the source link.

Via: [The Engineer]

After teasing us last month at CES, Vizio has finalized the specs on its new ultra-wide 21:9 televisions. Closely approximating the standard CinemaScope 2.39:1 ratio, these new televisions allow you to crop and scale ultra-widescreen films to eliminate the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. Launching initially as a 58-incher, the set will run $3499 when it hits stores next month. Packed with a full suite of internet apps, a Bluetooth remote with integrated keyboard, and passive-retarded half-resolution 3D, the edge-lit set pokes only 1.8 inches out from your wall, making it one of the the thinnest HDTVs available, the set will be supplemented by 50 and 70 inch versions by Christmastime next year.

Vizio has mentioned several times in the past their desire to move out of the bargain and into the high end television market, but this, their first stab at a true enthusiast product, seems to be at best a questionable one.  The people who want a 21:9 system, and can drop $3500 on a new TV, probably already have something set up. People can buy top-end bigger TVs, with full-resolution 3D, either in plasma or sectored LED backlighting, for under $2000 if you shop around.  So is there a market for this set? I don’t know, and I don’t know if Vizio knows either, but they certainly feel it’s worth a shot

Via: [LA Times]

Key Features in PowerDVD 12 Ultra

Play Blu-ray, 3D, DVD and any HD media: Whether it’s Blu-ray, upscaled DVDs, videos or photos, PowerDVD 12 Ultra can play them all flawlessly with optimized CPU/GPU hardware acceleration; new ultra-fast Instant Seek lets you search for movie scenes in your Blu-ray or DVD movies in a flash.
Turn any media into HD & 3D with TrueTheater® technology: Premium TrueTheater® enhancements upscale DVD movies to HD quality, or turn 2D movies and photos into 3D, including new support to convert Blu-ray movies to 3D.

Enhance player experience for ultimate enjoyment: PowerDVD 12 Ultra provides several enhanced features to provide total flexibility and ease of use for media browsing, including Smart Media Library, Instant Seek, Instant zoom, Instant View and Instant Scale.
Sync media gallery to portable devices: Smart Sync allows users to set up rules for syncing the PowerDVD media library to Android devices automatically; better yet, PowerDVD 12 will automatically choose the best fit video format for your mobile devices.

Social Media – enhanced & convenient: Watch videos from YouTube and view Facebook and Flickr photos and slideshows all from PowerDVD. You can also apply TrueTheater® enhancements to the media for a “better-than-browser” viewing experience.

While streaming protected content is almost certainly verboten, finally getting the ability to play FLAC on my phone sounds pretty sweet. PowerDVD 12 is available starting today for $49.99 standard, $79.99 Pro, and $99.99 Ultra, and those upgrading from previous versions can kick it up starting at $44.99. The mobile client is packaged free with the Ultra edition, and available for $19.99 for the standard and Pro. Basic remote functionality is in a seperate app on your mobile device can be had for $5, or free for Ultra users

Via: [Cyberlink]

Consider George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun.” Some would argue it’s George’s best composition, or maybe just his most famous. Play it back in your mind: there’s the acoustic opening, the unmistakable Moog synthesizer, a few handclaps thrown in for good measure, and George’s electric guitar solo. Say what now?

From Guitar Squid comes this amazing treat. George’s son Dhani managed to uncover a little magic when he sat down with George and Giles Martin to go over the track.  All of the familiar elements are there and then, boom, Dhani presses a button and a guitar solo that Harrison had recorded but scrapped is unearthed for the first time in over 40 years. The smile on Dhani’s face as he’s listening to the playback? I imagine that’s the same reaction most fans of the Fab Four will have upon hearing this little gem for the first time.

Via: [Guitar Squid]

This week on Amazon you can score ESPN’s award winning series of films, 30 for 30, for 50% off the retail price. The 6-disc set sports 1800 minutes of entertainment on some of the greatest moments and figures in sports history.

Episodes include:

Kings Ransom, The Band That Wouldnt Die, Small Potatoes: Who Killed The USFL?, Muhammad & Larry, Without Bias, The Legend of Jimmy The Greek, The U, Winning Time: Reggie Miller vs. The New York Knicks, Guru of Go, No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson, Silly Little Game, Run Ricky Run, The 16th Man, Straight Outta L.A., June 17th, 1994, The Two Escobars, The Birth of Big Air, Jordan Rides The Bus, Little Big Men, One Night in Vegas, Unmatched, The House of Steinbrenner, Into The Wind, Four Days in October, Once Brothers, Tim Richmond: To The Limit, Fernando Nation, Marion Jones: Press Pause, The Best That Never Was, and Pony Excess.

[Buy ESPN 30 for 30 Collector's Set on Blu-ray now at Amazon and save 50%]