Home theater

Add lighting effects to your stereo

Adding blinking lights to anything is a surefire way to make it totally obnoxious. For some of you, that's a good thing.

Here are two techniques you can use to add sound-reactive lights to your stereo, boom box, computer, or pretty much anything that makes music.

The first option is to use something like an EL Wire Sound Kit. These are sold online from various places and include some combination of electroluminescent wire, a power adapter, and a special power inverter that drives the wire's power in response to sound picked up by an integrated microphone.

The whole … Read more

How to remote-control Spotify with your iPhone or Android

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If you're one of the 15 to 26 million people who use Spotify to listen to music on the regular, you'd probably appreciate being able to control it remotely from your iPhone, Android, or other device, so you don't have to walk over to your computer, Android, or iPhone in order to skip a song, queue up a new playlist or album, and so on.

Luckily for you, we've found several apps that let you do exactly that, whether you're trying to control Spotify on a Mac, Windows, or even an iOS or Android … Read more

How to set up a subwoofer

August 29, 2012: This is an update of my subwoofer setup article from 2008.

Merely buying a great subwoofer is no guarantee that you'll wind up with great bass. There are too many ways to squander its performance potential, and that's why putting in the extra effort to achieve proper subwoofer setup is crucial. This two-part guide will help you get the best room-shaking bass from your subwoofer.

Part I: Placement and positioning

Part II: Connectivity and fine-tuning

Subwoofer Setup Part I:Placement and positioning While a subwoofer's deep bass is nondirectional, it would be unwise to … Read more

Mixing it up on the set of 'Copper'

"Copper," the new BBC America crime drama, is set in NYC in 1864, while the Civil War was still raging. I was intrigued because the 10-part series was created by Tom Fontana, who did "Homicide: Life on the Street" and "Oz," and on a more personal level, my old friend Frank Morrone is a sound mixer for the show. We met in 1999 when I was writing a feature story on mixing sound for Ron Howard's film "Edtv," and more recently, Morrone shared some of his experiences about mixing sound for … Read more

With AV receivers is sound quality more important than features?

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post about AV receiver feature glut. Today's receiver manufacturers put an inordinate amount of time and money into designing feature-laden receivers, and feature glut might be part of the reason why today's receivers don't sound as good as receivers did in the 1980s. I get it, today's consumers rarely compare one receiver's sound with another receiver, but they can count HDMI connections, so that's where the money goes.

It's not that Denon, Onkyo, Pioneer, Sony, and Yamaha aren't trying to make great-sounding receivers, … Read more

The Audiophiliac's Top 13 music Blu-ray discs

I wrote a Top 10 music Blu-ray list late last year, so it's time for an update.

Patricia Barber, "Modern Cool"

Sultry jazz singer Patricia Barber's "Modern Cool" album was a hit with the audiophile crowd soon after its release in 1998, so I was surprised to see it come out on Blu-ray with a new 5.1-channel DTS Master Audio mix. Even more surprised that the surround mix totally works. You're in the middle of the band, which I usually don't care for, but it clicks here. Barber wrote a lot … Read more

Are brick-and-mortar hi-fi stores still relevant?

Way back in the late 1970s, long before the Internet, iPods, and home theater changed the way we listened to music, I worked at Sound by Singer, a high-end audio store in NYC. I didn't know it at the time, but it was the golden age of high-end. It had a good, long run that made it to the early 1990s, but the high-end audio market didn't shrivel up and die. Here in NYC there are more high-end stores than there were in the golden age. Rents are sky-high, so you might wonder how the stores prosper, and … Read more

Mission impossible: Design great-sounding, affordable speakers

Andrew Jones has a degree in physics, but his real passion is speaker design. He worked as a research engineer for KEF, Infinity and now with Pioneer, and he's chiefly responsible for their ultra high-end TAD Reference line of speakers that sell for upwards of $80,000! So a few years ago when I first heard that Jones was working on a line of superaffordable speakers for Pioneer, I didn't believe it. I said, "You mean that Andrew Jones? No way." Well, it was that Mr. Jones, and the speakers were astonishingly good. The now-discontinued 5.1-channel, … Read more

High-end audio amplifiers, born in the U.S.A.

I have fond memories of the original Aragon 4004 power amplifier from my days when I worked as a high-end audio salesman. That was in the late 1980s and the big 200 watt amp sold for a lot less money than the reigning high-end amps of the period. The distinctive styling, with a "V" cutout in the 4004's chassis, made it stand out from rows of lookalike designs at the store. While the Aragon amps sold for a couple of thousand dollars, they were more affordable than most high-end amps. A few years after the 4004 arrived … Read more