home cinema

Go and put your hand on the lid of your amp right now if it sits behind a closed cabinet door. Someone posted a short thank you on r/hometheater this week for a recommendation they had picked up in another thread, the gist being that a cooling fan cost a bit more than they wanted to spend and...

Two entry level standmounts got put head to head this week, and the spec table underneath the review is more interesting for this forum than the listening verdict is. The Dali Sonik 1 uses a 29mm soft dome tweeter with a 13cm pulp and wood fibre mid/bass, rear ported, 6 ohms, 86dB sensitivity...

Twenty years ago the soundbar pitch was one box, no cables, no receiver. Yamaha showed the YSP-1 at Bristol in 2005 running the Ronin car chase and people in that room were genuinely looking around for hidden speakers. Someone raised that memory on AVForums this week and I cannot argue with...

Don't Breathe reached cinemas on 26 August 2016 and never got a 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray. On streaming it is usually 1080p with a 5.1 track, no Atmos. What Hi-Fi went back to it this week because it has sat in their test rotation for years, and the conclusion is one that gets lost in every soundbar...

Lumagen is taking a 9.4.6 room to CEDIA in Denver next month, Sound Room 7, second run of the Paragons of Home Cinema demo, and the piece debuting in it is the ArtisaN 8K Ready video and audio processor at 11,495 dollars. Eight inputs, two outputs, real time scaling, HDR dynamic tone mapping...

I keep a couple of 5.1 only titles in the demo pile precisely because they wreck the assumption that more channels equals better sound, and the best of them just turned ten. Don't Breathe hit cinemas on 26 August 2016, which is the awkward part of its life story. 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray had only...

Saw another post from someone who finally bought an AC Infinity setup for their rack, called it pricey but cheaper than frying a receiver, and I recognised myself from about two years ago. My AVR lives in a cabinet with a door, because that is the furniture we own and nobody was going to let me...

I still have a couple of the old show discs in a drawer, the ones you would come home with after a dealer visit and immediately annoy the household with. NextLevel Acoustics is trying to bring that back at CEDIA with Beyond the Room, except it is a download rather than a disc. Ninety seconds...

The number I keep chewing on from the Paragons of Home Cinema Episode II lineup is 10,000 ISO lumens. That is the Christie 4K1000-KS getting its CEDIA debut in Sound Room 7 - single-chip DLP, 0.8-inch HEP DMD, a 1.25-2.0:1 zoom, $14,461. If you have spent the last decade thinking in the 1,500 to...

Richer Sounds has the Sony Bravia Projector 8, the VPL-XW6100ES, down from 15,999 to 11,499 pounds. That's a 4,500 pound saving on a projector that won a What Hi-Fi award in the over-10,000 category, and it's roughly 30 per cent off a machine that hasn't been on sale that long. You need to be a...

Silver Series 8G is official and it runs to seven models: Silver 500 8G and Silver 300 8G floorstanders, Silver 100 8G and Silver 50 8G standmounters, a Silver Centre 8G, the Silver AMS 8G Atmos-enabled modules, and the one that actually changes things, a Silver On-Wall 8G. The 7G range that...

Marantz has slotted an AV 30 in below the AV 10 and AV 20, and the pitch is the familiar one: most of the flagship processing at a price you can actually reach. The spec sheet backs up the first half of that. It processes 11.4 channels, decodes Atmos, DTS:X, Auro-3D and IMAX Enhanced, runs...

Someone over on the home theater sub is stuck on this and I've been chewing on the same thing. He's looking at a larger room, seeing 100-inch sets from Sony, Samsung and Hisense in roughly the $1,800 to $2,000 range in the US, and now the projector plus screen route doesn't look like the obvious...

Somebody on Reddit put Sonic 3 up as their new family friendly Atmos reference disc, sitting just behind The Wild Robot, and their existing rotation is Top Gun Maverick, Saving Private Ryan and Avatar Fire and Ash. Their description of it is the useful part: no real LFE punch, but roughly every...

Someone on Reddit is stuck between a projector setup and a 100 inch TV for a big room, and the thing tipping them is that Sony, Samsung and Hisense 100 inch sets are landing around 1,800 to 2,000 dollars in the US now. That is genuinely close to a decent projector plus a real screen once you...

What Hi-Fi has run a physical media flag-waving piece, and the recommended 4K Blu-ray players are the Sony UBP-X700K in the middle, the Panasonic DP-UB820 as the overall pick and the DP-UB9000 at the top. If those names feel familiar it is because they have been the answer for years. The piece...

Someone posted a bedroom setup asking whether 9 feet between left and right is a problem when they sit about 10 feet 5 inches back, with a hallway opening just off the right speaker. The equal sided triangle thing gets repeated so often that people treat it as a rule, and it really is not. It is...

Someone was planning to strap two USB fans to the sides of a Denon S770H and run them off the receiver's own USB port to pull the hot air out. There is plenty of space either side of the unit and about an inch to an inch and a half above it. I have been down this road and it does not do what you...

The number that stopped me was 6.54 billion domestic through August 10, running 19.1% ahead of the same point last year and 28.8% ahead of 2024. It is even 6.9% ahead of 2023, which was the Barbie and Oppenheimer year. For context, all of 2025 finished at 8.66 billion, so the back half of this...

There is a thread going round where someone describes losing hours to the Interstellar IMAX sequences on a flatscreen, and it reminded me of the one argument the TV side wins outright. Those expanded ratio scenes fill a 16:9 panel completely, edge to edge, and the switch in and out is the whole...