The Sound Room

Home Theater PC

by Caleb Denison

My computer is 2 years old. By today's standards, that makes it about as up to date as an 8-Track cassette deck. It's time to upgrade.

Yes, my friends, another opportunity to geek out over parts, specs and other technological minutiae! Not only that, but I'm shooting to build a computer that will offer me all the cool functionality of a home theater PC. I'm not a PC guru by any means so, in addition to all the research I've been doing, I consult with a few buddies of mine.

In speaking with my friends about the latest trends in home computing, I've learned that this market is not at all dissimilar to the one I work in. It's filled with industry jargon and technical requirements that, to the uninitiated, will make your head spin and may just turn one off of the idea of a home built PC entirely. For instance: I knew that I would need a strong, capable audio card if I wanted to get Dolby Digital and DTS passthrough using a digital connection. Ha HA... Pretty smart, right?  No... not so much, it turns out that I need to make sure that the motherboard I have can support PCI-X2 something or other. What? I'm starting to feel like the PC guy in those Macintosh commercials.

This hub-bub made me realize two things:

1. When you're getting involved with something technological and expensive, consult an expert, and
2. As experts in our particular fields, we have a responsibility to make sure that needed information is offered in a clear, concise manner that is not ulteriorly motivated by making a sale.

That's why I love what I do here at Aperion. I help people put their hard earned money where the value is. What good is a tower speaker on a surround channel in a 12X15 room anyway? It's nice to have friends who will do the same thing for me as I build my home theater PC.

In the weeks to come, I'll describe the equipment I'm picking up, how the assembly is going and, most important, what the end results are. I can tell you that, by the time I'm done, I will have HD DVD running through my PC giving me 1080p resolution on a flat screen with 7.1 channels of kick-butt audio (that's one of those technical terms I was talking about). That's not all, though!

This system will serve as the bench gear for a series of A/V receiver reviews that I will start publishing in a couple of months. Keep an eye out for those, too!

Home Theater Week In Review, April 23-27, 2007

by Mike Hopkins

Last week Onkyo introduced their 1080p HDMI 1.3 receivers, so what better than to add a nice 1080p display for the full HD package!  Westinghouse, a relative unknown in the TV world has unveiled specs and pricing for their 2007 line of 1080p LCD's.  The TX-F430S series will have a 1920x1080 resolution, ATSC tuner, 4 HDMI inputs and a 8ms response time.  The 42" will run $1600 and $1800 for the 47".  The higher end TX-F480S series will have a faster 6.5ms response time. The 52" will run $2500.

Switching gears, I recently picked up a ipod shuffle for working out at the gym and I absolutely love it.  What I am sick of the new i-this and i-that peripheral products that come out every week..but this week is special.  First, for the ridiculous, I give you the "George Foreman iGrill." No need for an explanation.

But wait! There's more! Another ridiculous but cool gizmo..the Miuro Robot Speakers  Check this out, I guess this little guy would follow you around the house and play music that is wirelessly streamed from your computer. Neat idea — would you use it?

Movies for next week:

DVD: Dreamgirls, The Hitcher, Alpha Dog, Little Children

HD DVD:  Alpha Dog, Dreamgirls, The Hitcher

Blu-ray: Happily N' Ever After, Dreamgirls

24: 12-1am

by Matt Putnam

There is something about Doyle that makes me love seeing him get “Jacked”. At the end of last episode when Bauer smelled out the ambush and pulled his weapon on Doyle, it brought me so much joy. Then, this week, Jack left him in the middle no where. I think I like this so much because Doyle is a tough dude. I mean, comparing Doyle to any of us is like comparing Brian Urlacher to Randy Moss (he’s bigger, badder, and scarier). But compared to Jack Bauer, Doyle is like a little baby bunny with no teeth, cancer and a broken leg.

Well, the terror is over and it’s time for the justice department to place some blame. Unfortunately, Bill Buchanan had to be the fall guy and was forced to resign by….his wife. Ouch, that hurts. I wonder if President Palmer will come back and reinstate him. What? It could happen.

As for everything else, the Chinese have the component, Morris wants out, Jack Bauer is under arrest, Audrey has lost her marbles, there’s a spy helping the bad guys, and the Russians know we gave the Chinese the component.- so much for the worst being behind us. Anybody have any guesses on who the spy is?

Things to Expect Next Week: The relationship between Curly Bill (New President) and his assistant will still make your skin crawl. CTU will release Jack Bauer because they need him (d’uh). I think it’s about time for Jack to choke someone, I mean, it’s been a couple weeks and he’s due.

Things Not to Expect Next Week: The government won’t let Jack Bauer do whatever he wants…but they should. Doyle will not apologize to Jack for being a darsh, but he should. Jack’s dad, Philip Bauer will not come back, but he REALLY should (I’ve been predicting this for weeks and I’m starting to loose confidence).

Home Theater Week In Review, April 16-20, 2007

by Mike Hopkins

Could this be it!!!? Will Onkyo be the first electronics company to put everything you need into a single package? HDMI 1.3, Dolby Digital TrueHD, DTS HD MASTER, 1080p upconversion. Someone (ohgami) on avsforum has done a bit of digging and came up with specifications for Onkyo's new line of 2007 receivers. The xx5 models will all be carrying HDMI 1.3a, even the entry level TX-ST505 at $299. To get Dolby Digital TrueHD and DTS HD Master, you will need to step up to TX-SR605 at only $599—shipping in mid-May! The sweet spot for me was the TX-SR805 at $1099. Here are the specs. Thanks Ohgami!

• TX-SR805 MSRP $1099 Est. Shipping date mid-May
• Full A/V Processing via HDMI 1.3a with Upconversion (3 in 1 out)
• HDMI Deep Color Capable (36bit)
• Component Video Upconversion and HDTV-Capable (100 MHZ) Video Switching (3 in 1 out)
• WRAT/ Optimum Gain Volume Circuitry/ Non-Scaling Configuration/ A-Form Listening Mode Memory/ RI
• Faroudja DCDi
• Audyssey MultEQ XT Room Acoustics Correction
• 7.1 Multichannel Inputs for PCM Delivery of Hi-Def Audio Sources
• DOLBY Decoder - PLIIx, DD, DD-EX, TrueHD
• DTS Decoder - DTS, ES, NEO6, 96/24, HD Master Audio
• THX Ultra2 Certified
• Burr-Brown 192/24-bit DAC on all Channels (TI Architecture (PCM1796)
• S-Video (6 in 1 out)
• Digital Audio IN (OPT/COAX) 3/3; OUT (OPT) 1
• Composite (6 in 1 out)
• Power 130W/Ch
• Powered Zone 2 with Balance Volume and tone control
• Powered Zone 3
• Bi-Amp Capable

This receiver has is all, and then some. Plenty of power at 130watts, powered zone 2 and 3! But the beauty is HDMI 1.3, DD TrueHD and DTS HD Master...all passed though one HDMI cable with Deep Color as well. Done!...oh wait, one more thing. In addition to all of the wonderful video processing the 805 will also be using Burr Brown DAC's for great sound as well. Now lets see what Denon has up their sleeve.

Movies for Next Week

DVD: Night at the Museum, Deja vu, The Queen.

HD DVD: The Nutty Professor, Digital Video Essentials, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Failure to Launch, Planet Earth: The Complete Collection

Blu-ray: Deja Vu, Failure to Launch, Night at the Museum, Planet Earth, The Queen, Secret Window, Ultimate Avengers Collection.

Web 2.0 is.... Convergence?

by Alex Pasco

I too attended the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this week.  It was an interesting time, and I learned a lot. This year featured a pretty big focus on communication, usability, cooperation between teams of varying skillsets, and a whole lot of convergence - which is what I'd like to talk about.  But first, a little story.

The continent of Africa isn't generally known to be very wired.  It's overwhelmingly poor, and the rural villages barely have power, let alone fiber-optic network FiOS network drops from Verizon (available near you!) But over the past few years, a startling change has occured.  Instead of wiring up small communities with traditional telephone wire, it's become a trend to sidestep that entire process and erect cellphone towers instead. It's cheaper and simpler.  So these small villages are just now getting a taste of what it's like being connected to a wired-in world.  That's not what's really remarkable, though.  While I was attending a lecture on "The Future of e-commerce" by Eric Billingsley from Ebay, he told a very interesting story that absolutely exposes the very human trait of extreme creative adaptation and illustrates how unpredictable levels of convergence happen in the most unlikely of places.

Typically, in small African villages, a family is split up much of the time.  The father will go to work in the city, while the mother stays home to tend to the children.  Every month or two the father will send money home, and only comes home a few times a year.  The problem with this is that it's ridiculously difficult to reliably send money in a continent that has no wires, no western union, no local branch of Wells Fargo - just miles and miles of dust, bandits and corruption (not to mention lions.)  But what's actually happening is fascinating. 

Since many small communities are now near cellphone towers, there are a handful of people within them who have cellphones.  The interesting thing about this is that these people are basically human payphones for the village.  When someone needs to use the phone, they pay them a little money to use the phone.  This is so popular that some of these people make a decent living doing this.  Here's the interesting part.  The remote fathers are actually using these people as living banks; they are conduits through which they send money home, completely circumventing banks, corruption, and headache.  They're doing this by purchasing pre-paid phone cards.  Yes, the same cards that are everywhere in third world countries.  Here's how it works:  The father buys a pre-paid phone card, and learns the activation number.  He sends an SMS text message to the "human payphone" back in his village, who uses the number to charge up their phone with minutes.  Then they use the liquid cash that people pay them to use the phone to pay the man's wife (and presumably they take a small convenience fee.) 

This absolutely amazes me - people using their available technology in creative ways that I'm positive the cellphone makers and the phone card providers never anticipated.   This is very much like the current state of the web.  Since many people are creating tools that provide external APIs (application programming interfaces) that other designers and developers can use on their own sites (google maps is an excellent example of this type of API), people can now build whatever they want without having to design bits and pieces from scratch.  This is enabling nimble development, quick turnarounds, and products that no one has ever thought of, including the original designers of the tools people are using.

It's a great time to work on the internet, that is for sure. 

24: 11pm - 12am

by Matt Putnam

So now we know what the Chinese want; the Russian trigger mechanism from the suitcase nukes. It seems an internal code will give them access to the entire library of Russian defense technology. Is it worth trading it to the Chinese to get Audrey back? You betcha.

For those of you thought that Jack Bauer was crying when he was talking with the President, think again. METHOD ACTING. That’s right, he was method acting. If Jack were truly crying, only bullets and acid would come out of his tear ducts. And he doesn’t “cry” when he’s sad, only when he’s angry and he needs a weapon. I saw Jack unleash his tear ducts on this guy in a 7-eleven parking lot one time….not pretty.

Cheng Zhi is a marked man. The man who is responsible for Jack’s two long years of torture in the Chinese prison is finally back between the crosshairs. Now, you see, I was right. The Chinese aren’t using Audrey to get to Jack. Jack is using Audrey to keep those Chinese thugs close. Jack doesn’t have time for that long flight to China. He likes his revenge all wrapped up in a nice neat 24 hour period. Ah, the genius that is Jack Bauer.

Since President Palmer came down with sudden brain explosion syndrome it looks like Curly Bill is back at the helm. Get ready for creepy, violent President Daniels to not give a rip about Jack Bauer and his plans to save Audrey. That means it is, once again, Jack vs. the world. Just the way he likes it…

Things to Expect Next Week: More uncomfortable moments with Chloe…great. More sentences from me that will include “…”. More of Doyle getting owned by Jack Bauer.

Things Not to Expect Next Week: Jack Bauer will not participate in casual Friday. Jack Bauer will not refer to his messenger bag as a “man purse”. Jack Bauer will not make a quick stop at In-N-Out Burger before he saves Audrey…but he should.

O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo 2007 - Day 2, Part 2

My first session today was entitled "The People Formerly Known as the Audience" with Derek Powazek. Derek was billed as an "Internet Pioneer" (Founder of 8020 Publishing and JPG Magazine.) Joining Derek was Heather Champ (Community Manager of Flikr and co-founder of JPG Magazine.) The session message was that in this age of "user generated content" the media used on the Web needs to change in order to accommodate consumers who have now become producers. An interesting example of this done poorly was given using GM's attempt to let Chevy Tahoe owners express their experiences with the SUV with a "Make-Your-Own Ad" campaign. Instead of pointing out all the great stuff about the Tahoe, GM received a slew of anti-SUV, negative-impact-on-the-environment entries. The text entry was input to a Flash app which apparently published live to the Web. Oops. Read more...

Another (particularly valuable) session was "Embracing the Chaos; Designing for and with Community" with Mike Beltzner of Mozilla. Mike rides herd on the Firefox community and development. His strategy is three fold. Listen, lead, and play. LISTEN to your community because they're often much smarter than you are. (This doesn't necessarily mean that you implement everything.) LEAD by having firm policies and structure for users—but stay in touch! Also, (to use a military metaphor) since the specifics of an order rarely survives intact to the troops, you must always include the intent behind the rules and policies. And finally, PLAY. Let your community play and experiment, both with ideas and product. It's the suggestions built on creativity that hold the most promise. Allowing open dialog will feel dangerous, but ultimately, transparency pays off in credibility.

What I learned today at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo

1. Think through, research, test, and have a disaster recovery plan in place for all community building ventures BEFORE implementing.
2. Community environments and product development can be very positively influenced by the community if the environment and feedback loop is properly managed.
3. "Camps" forming within a community should be encouraged. "Smart" users are to be identified and promoted to places of higher influence.
4. Treat disagreements as negotiations.
5. In gathering feedback, offer a path of least resistance that channels input to where it can be best addressed.
6. Fitt's Law is being applied to Web design. If you're not familiar with the model, check out the Wikipedia entry. On the Web it relates to, for example, button size, color, and location — it "fits" pretty well with user-centric design.

More stuff I've observed about San Francisco:

1. San Francisco has much better weather than Portland this time of year. How would I know? As part of the herds moving from session to session, I can see the bright blue sky through the floor to the extremely high ceiling windows of the Moscone Center West. And VERY deep down inside, I'm happy for the people who are outside enjoying it.

O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo 2007 - Day 2, Part 1

by Brenda Farrier

So, what (again) is Web 2.0? Bubble 2.0?

Sure, there's been a LOT of hype around this new phase of the Web, and being surrounded by all the buzz I can't help but be reminded of the pre-dot-com-crash days. Yet regardless of the speculation and money being poured into the technology, the heart of Web 2.0 remains the changing role of Web users. We can't, however, overlook the necessity of the tools that make this brave new Web world possible. The challenge is how to create this sophisticated task-focused user interface for people who for the most part couldn't care less about the technology behind it. These tools, such as RIA's (Rich Internet Applications), need to be as close to invisible as possible. As one conference speaker illustrated, in order to live comfortably in a house you have to have plumbing. It's important, obviously, but you don't spend much time thinking about it—unless you're a plumber. Web 2.0 absolutely needs the tools, but users of Web 2.0 shouldn't really spend much time (if any) thinking about them — unless you're a developer, who are by the way in attendance at this conference en mass. The Expo has several tracks addressing development and code, and in fact when I ran into our lead developer, Lev Tsypin, he seemed impressed by what he called the "cutting-edge technologies" being presented and discussed.

Ok, so what are the Web 2.0 tools? From the user's perspective they're groups and forums, chats, social networks, the blogosphere, photo and video sharing sites, email lists, wiki's, RSS, tagging, mobile portability, and more. Offline gatherings tie in as well; events, meet-ups, conferences, dinners...

More on the sessions and what I've taken away in my next post.

O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo 2007 - Day 1

by Brenda Farrier

What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is people. No, not like Soylent Green. Soylent Green is OLD people, and there's nothing old (school) about Web 2.0. Old school is corporate online brochures, static e-commerce sites and Web pages with a dozen pictures of your cat. Really old school is the advent of animated gifs and Times New Roman text that stretched across 100% of your 640x480 Mozilla or Netscape browser window. Vivid is my memory of the day I created my first animated gif (anyone remember the GIF89a?) and posted it to my ".../~brenda" Web site (an early version of a blog circa early1994).It was a thrill rivaled only by my first PERL script. We've come a long way baby, and while we still post pics of our cats, we also post videos of their antics, create MySpace pages for them, blog about them, and tag it all.. We join communities of other (metaphoral) cat lovin' freaks where we hang out together learning what we have in common and about all about things we don't. We can share, collaborate, solve problems, recommend, help, teach, correct and encourage.

Web 2.0 is interaction. Its ALIVE! Yes, like Young Frankenstein's creation, only attractive and articulate (no disrepect to Peter Boyle intended). Yes, you can still spot the sutures and sometimes a finger or eyebrow gets rejected by the rest of the body, but it walks and talks and breathes.

So... the conference. Wow. We are the world! I doubt I've ever heard more languages spoken in one place in my life! Today I overheard German, Japanese, Swedish, Korean, French, Hindi, Hebrew, Portuguese, Canadian (what's that aboot?), and a few languages I didn't recognize. Cool. Very cool.

I had breakfast and a lively conversation with two blokes from the UK. They work for a company called Astrogrid. Their (very expensive) government sponsored open source project is to create a database combining astrological data from from various astrology science institutes in the UK and internationally. Really interesting stuff, but we spent most of our time talking about 24. Ah yes, the international language of Jack Bauer.

At lunch I had the pleasure of hanging out with Daphna Steinmetz (Associate VP of Comverse Innovation Labs) here from the Tel Aviv office. She'd arrived from the airport after a 17 hour flight and just before lunch with a pretty severe case of jet lag — a fact that made her patience with my fledgling skills at speaking Hebrew all that more generous. As for lunch itself, I found the mediterrrenean salad supplied by the conference to be surprisingly tasty. Ahhh, baklava.

The Sunday conference schedule was unique in that the sessions were a lot longer than those scheduled for the rest of the expo. I attended Community Evangelism presented by Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency and Anil Dash of Six Apart (the parent of Typepad.) The twosome covered the the philosophy of community evangelism, comparing the term to its traditional religious use. Basically, it's about attitude. A religious evangelist is much more effective when his/her life speaks the belief as opposed to "selling" it. Community evangelists should become customer advocates and live amongst the people- interacting. It is NOT a marketing role.

What I learned today at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo:

1. Web 2.0 is global
2. Community Evangelists are the human face of the company. Being effective requires persistence. The human skills required are being a good listener, a detective, a critic (internal to the company), a catalyst, intuitive, inquisitive, a bit of a geek, and most importantly - driven by relationship.
3. "Transactions are a by-product of healthy relationships. Sometimes transactions don't matter." Jerry Michalski
4. Control is out. The customer is now in control.
5. Let the seller beware
6. People are the message
7. You can't create a community. You build it by being where your audience is - psychologically and "physically."

More stuff I've observed about San Francisco:

• San Francisco emergency vehicles begin using their sirens in earnest just as business travelers enter REM sleep.

O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo 2007 - On Deck

by Brenda Farrier

This year's Web 2.0 conference is set to start tomorrow morning in San Francisco. This is the 2nd year of the conference and my first year attending. The folks at O'Reilly have assembled an impressive cast of presenters in the 4 day run. The keynote speakers include; Tim O'Reilly (of course), Jeffery P. Bezos (Founder and CEO of Amazon), Kevin Lynch, Chief (Software Architect of Adobe), David Sifry (CEO and founder of Technorati), Eric Schmidt (Google), Jeff Weiner  (Yahoo!}, Subra Iyar (WebEx }, and others.

I flew in from Portland tonight on Alaska Airlines and arrived via Super Shuttle at the reasonably priced (and decidedly low-tech) Hotel Beresford which I booked by faith through hotels.com. In reading the reviews on several Web sites including Expedia, and Tripadvisor.com, I thought I'd cover the bases - clean, quiet, good location, good value - but I failed to come up the brilliant idea to check Internet access until AFTER booking the room. I called the hotel and was told (in broken English) that the room didn't have WiFi, but the lobby did. What I actually found was a museum piece of a computer with an ethernet connection. The "computer" is located in a room near the lobby which also contains the hotel's only ice dispenser and a vending machine selling a small bag of Lay's "original" potato chips for 5 bucks. In the hotel's defense, all the similar bags of chips are labeled "$1.50", so I'm guessing there must have been some sort of vending machine loading mishap — OR they're able to get $5 for a small bag of chips when it's the last bag at 2AM. Anyway, while I ended up with a pretty comfortable room in the heart of San Francisco for only $99 a night, I fear the lack of Internet in my room will be the source of much frustration...but hey, I'm in San Francisco!

So, though far from comprehensive, I intend to give a daily account of my experience at the Web 2.0 Expo.

What I learned today at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo:

1. Absolutely nothing. The conference starts tomorrow

What I've observed about San Francisco in the past 3 hours:

1. Premium gas (full serve?) in SF is $3.60 to $3.80 per gallon downtown -about a buck higher than my favorite station in SW Portland
2. San Francisco and Portland are sister cities in the philosophy of walking against traffic lights.
3. SF TV news is far less tabloid than Portland's. As hard as I tried, I couldn't find the local Meth report.
4. Every panhandler I've encountered so far (more numerous per capita than Portland?) adds "baby" to the beginning or end of each request for money."Can you spare a little change baby?" or "Hi baby, could ya help me out?"
5. I've also noticed that I tend to compare things to Portland. And yes, I do get out. I used to live in the Bay area and I prefer Portland thank you very much.

Posted from the "Sugar Cafe" (read hipster bar) a couple of doors down. (free WiFi!)

See you tomorrow...