home cinema

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...

Quad announced a speaker line called Elegan and the framing is a revival of the old L series, aimed at what the coverage calls accessible hi-fi. No pricing, driver count or cabinet detail in anything I have read yet, so treat all of this as a reaction rather than an assessment. Quad is one of...

In the world of projectors, the optical engine is often referred to as the “heart” of the device—it directly impacts brightness, color accuracy, and overall image clarity. With the launch of its latest flagship model, the Dangbei S7 Ultra Max, Dangbei introduces its self-developed Eclipse...

Valentine's Day is approaching, a good gift can make this holiday belonging to you more romantic. In addition to gifts for each other, some items that can increase the atmosphere of the holiday can also bring unexpected effects. Imagine yourself and your loved one lying together on the couch...

The Dangbei Mars Pro comes up frequently in smart home projector search results as many users have given feedback that this projector offers superior performance for the same price point. It's a projector with native 4K resolution, 25,000 hours of lamp life and the new HDMI 2.1 standard...

In recent years, as users' demand for large-screen entertainment increases, competition in the TV industry has intensified, with high-quality TV panels and technologies emerging, but the price of buying a large-size TV with high picture quality is a deterrent. As a result, more and more users...

The JBL 4305P is the first active speaker in the consumer-grade Studio Monitor series, offering amazing performance and wired/wireless connectivity. The 4305P uses a range of JBL's patented acoustic technologies to deliver powerful audio impact. It is also equipped with a wealth of wired and...