home cinema

JVC's free firmware for the DLA-NZ900 and NZ800, which the RS4200 and RS3200 get through distribution, is one of the more substantial no-cost updates I have seen land on a projector. The headline is a new picture mode called Frame Adapt HDR Vivid, alongside a Highlight Color Control setting with...

Had to read this one twice. Dynaudio is closing its US subsidiary in the fall and stepping back from North America entirely to concentrate on Europe and Asia. The stated reasons are ongoing economic challenges and market uncertainty, which is corporate for the numbers stopped working and tells...

Everyone is talking about the Dirac situation on these, but the spec that made me sit up is 1440p passthrough and AMD FreeSync compatibility across all four models - the Cinema 50 Series 2, both Cinema 60s and the slimline 70s. Receivers have spent years treating PC gamers as somebody else's...

Someone asked this on the home theater sub and I thought it was a fair question rather than a naive one. Scroll through setup threads and you see Klipsch, SVS, Polk, JBL, Monitor Audio, KEF if the budget stretches. B&W barely comes up, despite being one of the best known speaker names on the...

There is a thread on the home theater sub that I wish more people would copy. Guy posted a while back saying he had upgraded to an Onkyo TX-RZ30 and a pair of B&W 603s and was underwhelmed by the low end and slightly overwhelmed by the top end. The replies mostly told him not to buy more...

Marantz has pushed out the Cinema Series 2 range. Cinema 50, Cinema 60 and Cinema 70s, on sale August 15, spanning $1,500 to $3,000. The spec people will argue about first is channel count. The 50 is nine channels at 110W, the 60 is seven at 100W, the 70s is seven at 50W. Nine on the flagship in...

Sonos has an event lined up for September and the only thing anyone has to work with is the language: conversational computing and predictive intelligence. No category, no specs, nothing about what the device actually is. I have no idea what it is and neither does anybody writing about it, so...

What Hi-Fi ran this as their Home Cinema Week debate in July, ended up split down the middle, and have now kicked it out to readers. Tom Parsons argued the hardware case, that USTs and 100-inch sets have made a big picture trivially easy compared to a decade ago. Alastair Stevenson argued the...

Home Cinema Choice ran a retrospective on the birth of Blu-ray and it reminded me how much of the standard story is wrong. The usual telling is that Warner switched sides and HD DVD folded. True, but it's the ending, not the reason. The context the piece sets up matters. By 2000 DVD was already...

Magnat's Monitor Reference 5A is a pair of powered stereo floorstanders with HDMI ARC on board, pitched at GBP 759, and the review frames it as the question I keep coming back to: why is a soundbar the default answer for TV audio when a pair of active speakers costs about the same and actually...

Pioneer has been fairly quiet in AV receivers for a while, and the VSA-LX805 is the swing at getting back to being a first-choice brand. It's an 11-channel flagship, which is the obvious way to do it: match the competition on channel count and tick every format box on the way past. Dolby Atmos...

Monitor Audio has three new premium subwoofers in the Anthra range and Home Cinema Choice went straight for the flagship 15in model, the W15. The detail that made me look twice wasn't sonic. It arrived in one of the smallest boxes the reviewer had seen for a 15in sub, with a courier visibly...

Home Cinema Choice got time with Perlisten's CTO Erik Wiederholtz ahead of auditioning the new R18s subwoofer, and the quote they led with was that the company doesn't want to make me-too products. Every brand says a version of that. Perlisten at least has receipts: they were the first company...

FlatpanelsHD has been testing a pair of HomePods specifically as Apple TV audio rather than as music speakers, which is the framing I have wanted someone to take seriously for a while. The setup is genuinely tempting on paper. Two speakers, no rack, no receiver, no cable run across the room...

Home Cinema Choice has a look back at how Blu-ray got started, and it prompted a memory I would rather not have. Everyone tells the format war story the same way - Blu-ray against HD DVD, studios picking sides, Warner flipping and the whole thing collapsing inside a few weeks. That part is well...

What Hi-Fi has finally got the Q Acoustics 3050c 5.1 package into its test room and the verdict lands where these packages nearly always land. Agile, energetic, impressive bass, and then a centre channel described as middling, with a noted lack of consistency across the front three. That last...

Every year or so I try this again, and What Hi-Fi running a VR home cinema piece for their Home Cinema Week pushed me into another go. Their writer ran the same experiment on a Quest 2 and came away positive about the flexibility, which matches my experience right up to the point where I want to...

What Hi-Fi went round the industry again this year and asked engineers at the manufacturers which scenes they actually reach for when benchmarking kit. Worth reading, but read it with one eye open. Harman's consumer audio side put forward the Impossible Race from Ready Player One, Shallow from...

A batch of catalog titles turned up in 4K with HDR and it is a strange spread. Con Air, Speed Racer, Sleepers, Deep Blue Sea, Eraser and Drop Zone, sitting alongside The Ninth Gate and Fight Club. That is three or four completely different problems being addressed with the same tool. The mid...

The 2026 edition of Recommended Components landed and the structure is what it has always been. Everything listed has been reviewed in the magazine, sorted into classes, alphabetical within each class, each entry carrying a price, a short synopsis and a pointer to the issue the original review...