#videophile

Happy 75th Birthday to one of the biggest influences in my life, George Lucas, who through @starwars created THX Ltd. and Skywalker Sound!

Skywalker Sound’s work that led me to love them includes Star Wars, Volcano, Titan A.E., Terminator 2, and Toy Story, plus The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Thanks go to Ben Burtt, Gary Rydstrom and Tom Myers!

I came to know THX because of @disneyanimation‘s Bambi (1997 VHS release) too. THX also joined forces with Dolby to create Dolby Digital Surround EX in 1999 for Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace! Why isn’t that used more than just plain 5.1 Dolby Surround???

If one’s goal is to reproduce the sound of live music, logic suggests that at some point the designer must listen to his creation in order to understand how much (or how little) it sounds like the live event. Some designers in the industry maintain that making judgments on the success of one’s design through listening is subjective and unscientific. They believe that only through the application of the right theories, or the strict adherence to a certain set of measurements can one reliably approach the ideal.

Yet the history of high-end audio is littered with electronics and loudspeakers that achieve sterling performance on the test bench, and yet, to the ears of even the average listener, fail to produce life-like sound. They lack the ineffable sense of rightness that momentarily suspends disbelief.

Dave Wilson is unapologetic about using his ears as a design tool because while fidelity of the live event may be difficult to measure, it is not difficult for even the casual listener to hear. But when listening becomes rigorous and disciplined—that is to say, empirical—it can bear even greater benefits.

Those of you who remember my test stream a few days ago will know that I ran in to a problem with the Component Converter I bought: the audio is too loud, to the point where it sounds like it’s clipping.

The website I bought it from, hdtvsupply.com, blames everything but the device itself. It can’t be their converter device, it has to be something else. So I made this video to demonstrate that the audio is normal in every other circumstance except for the one where I use their converter.

It’s worth noting that I didn’t submit a tech support request to hdtvsupply.com about this -- I left a lukewarm product review for the device in which I mentioned the issue and instead of publishing that review on their site, their tech support contacted me to explain their device couldn’t be faulty. My review will likely never go up on their site.

In other words: hdtvsupply.com only allows positive reviews of their products to be published. If you report a problem with their hardware, they’ll hold your review and claim it’s a problem on your end.

Why on earth did I use a website like hdtvsupply.com? Because I was shopping around for a low-latency, high-quality component-to-hdmi converter and they were a recommendation. I’d never heard of them before, and now I’m wondering of the person who recommended them works there, because this is honestly a very poor experience on my part.

I’d think about putting in for a refund but given the “It can’t be a problem with our stuff, it has to be you” rhetoric, even in the face of this video evidence, I’m not sure they’d honor a refund.

Introducing the Sabrina

The inspiration for Sabrina arose from two distinct and seemingly disparate sources: the original WATT/Puppy, and the Alexandria XLF. The WATT/Puppy was the result of Dave Wilson’s belief that a well-designed compact loudspeaker could outperform many of the much larger state-of-the-art systems of its day. Sabrina is nearly the same size as its 1980s progenitor. The XLF, on the other hand, represents the current pinnacle of Wilson’s three-decades-long quest to bridge the gulf between live, unamplified music and its reproduction. The XLF platform offers the world’s most precise time-alignment capability, custom-designed drivers, and cabinet modules constructed from Wilson’s proprietary materials, reducing cabinet resonance and coloration to inaudible levels.

The objective for Sabrina was to take the wealth of knowledge and experience contained in the XLF and distill it down to its essence. To create a loudspeaker that, like the first WATT/Puppy, could stand alongside much larger systems and offer the kind of dynamic contrast and harmonic expression that is the defining character of Wilson Audio loudspeakers.