Xigga

A good TV is required for the best viewing experience, but for a complete experience you need good audio too.  So today I’m going to review the Samsung HT-AS720 5.1ch system.  Though the title says it’s Bluray, it is simply compatible with Bluray.  It’s just a marketing tactic by Samsung, it doesn’t have a Bluray player.  That’s the first thing you need to know about it.  Some might get fooled by it :).

First, let’s talk about power.  With the 5.1 setup you can get an impressive 650 watts.  150 watts goes to the subwoofer and you get 100 watts per channel for the 5 satellites, so you get a total of 650 watts.  If you want a 7.1 system, you can easily buy 2 more satellite speakers and make it a 7.1 system.  The receiver has support for a 7.1 speaker setup, and you will get an impressive 850 watts!  An important feature of the subwoofer is that it’s active, meaning it has it’s own power source and it does NOT get it’s power from the receiver.  Some subwoofers (cough Bose cough) are passive, so they get their power from the receiver.  If the specs don’t mention if a subwoofer is active or passive you can check the subwoofer and see if it has a wire/connection for an AC outlet.  A receiver can only supply so much power, and to get a good deep bass your sub needs to get sufficient power.  Not many people know about this so I had to mention it.

Now the reciver supports decoding of several formats, and they are:  Dolby Digital, Dolby Pro Logic II, Dolby Pro Logic IIx, Dolby Digital EX, DTS, DTS ES Discrete 6.1, DTS 96/24, and DTS Neo 6.  Most of those audio formats you’re never heard of.  Don’t worry, most Blurays and DVDs have multiple audio formats.  Majority of the movies have Dolby Digital.  Some will also have DTS.  DTS is superior to Dolby Digital.  The reason are out of the scope of this review, so I’ll leave it for another time.

There’s only 4 audio formats this receiver doesn’t support.  The 4 are sDSM or DNSe, Dolby Digital+, Dolby True HD, DTS-HD.  Since a DVD/Bluray will have Dolby Digital/DTS, it’s not a big deal.

Another good feature about this receiver is that it’s Anynet+ capable.  Anynet+ allows devices talk to each other.  So if you have an Anynet+ Samsung DVD player and you have this system hooked up to it, when you turn on the DVD player, it will turn the receiver one and switch it to the DVD input so you never have to manually change the input each time you switch between DVD/Bluray/TV.  Anynet+ is only available on Samsung devices because it was created by them, but it works very nicely.

Those are the important features.  Now lets talk about the most important quality of this system: the sound.  The sound is awesome!  The bass is deep and smooth.  There’s no crackling in the bass.  The highs and mids are clear and audible.  On some systems you can’t hear the mids and the highs clearly, one covers up  the other, but not on these speakers.  The satellites are adequately power (100W) and provide clear sound.  You can turn the volume up high and the sound is very powerful.  I haven’t turned it all the way up yet so I’m not sure how it handles at full power.

So all in all this is a great system.  For the price it is very much worth it.  You can check the price for the HT-AS720 on Amazon. I recommended Amazon because they always have the lowest prices, free shipping, and no taxes.

It’s been a while since I lasted posted.  Samsung has released the 8 and 9 series in the some parts of the country.  They’re going for a high price right now.  Thought I don’t see a difference between the 8 series and the 7 series.  The only difference is that the 8 series is thinner.  The contrast ratio is the same and the other specs are the same too.

The 9 series is definitely a winner.  It’s got LED SmartLighting, which gives 2,000,000:1 Dynamic Contrast Ratio.  It also has a blue/gray Touch of Color.  The 6, 7, and 8 series have red.  The thing I don’t like about it is that they don’t have a 52″.  They only have a 46″ and a 55″.  For the 55″ the price is $4,200!  If it was a 52″, it would’ve run at about $3500.  I do love the 55″ size.  The LN55A950 is the successor to the 57″ 81F series that was released last year.  The 81F was 500,000:1 DCR.  There were some problems with the LED SmartLighting, which should be fixed now.  Not many people have the 9 series, so I haven’t heard of anything yet.

Also Samsung has come out with some newer models of the 5, 6, 7 and 8 series.  The original models ended with a 50, like 550, 650, 750, and 850.  But now they have 560, 760, and 860.  I did some research on them and they aren’t any better than the 50’s.  My guess is that they changed some of the internals of the TV.  Maybe they got a new motherboard or new panel manufacturer.  The only noticeable difference from their specs online is that they have less analog inputs.  So if you’re looking to buy a Samsung and can’t decide between the 50’s and the 60’s, get the 50.  It’s cheaper and it’s the same as the 60’s.  Why does Samsung have to create new SKUs?  It’s already complicated enough having so many series of LCD TVs.

To emphasize my point about the 8 series, it’s NO DIFFERENT than the 7 series.  They both have the same specs, except the depth of the TV.  I would not buy the 8 series over the 7 series.  There is no quality difference.  If you want something better than the 7 series, go up to the 9 series.  In the 9 series, you will only find two sizes: 46″ and 55″.  The price difference is huge from 46″ to 55″.  It’s about $1,800.  If the 55″ price seems too high for you wait until November-December.  That’s when they will have the big sales and you should see some good prices drops.  This goes for all products, not just TVs.  Hope this shed some light on the new Samsungs.  Again, the 8 series is just for filler.  They needed a reason for the huge price increase for their premium TVs, so they added an 8 series, and made their premium TVs the 9 series.

Hello Everyone,

I just did a major re-write to my library. The code is very optimized now. Before I had a lot of unneeded functions, objects, and buffers (OMG!). I was able to knock out a lot of stuff. The only CPU intensive aspect of the library is detecting the MPEG Audio Info. For those of you who don’t know what it means, MPEG Audio Info contains information about the actual audio stream, like bitrate, sample rate, channels, duration, etc. That information is not part of the ID3 tag. Since MP3’s are stream based, each audio sample has its own MPEG Audio header. The trouble is detecting if the data is MPEG Audio Info or if it’s just the audio stream. What I am doing right now is, I’m parsing the whole MP3 file and reading all MPEG Audio Info patterns and doing a complex check to see if it’s a valid MPEG Audio Info header. This is taking up most of the CPU time. It’s all done in memory, but it’s still a big hit to performance.

I’m going to continue finding a better way to detect valid MPEG Audio Info headers without doing a cross check with the other headers. Also I’m ignoring all MPEG Audio Info headers if they say anything other than MPEG 1 Layer 3. Some people may have MPEG 1 Layer 2, or other combinations. So my library won’t work with that.

Other good news is that it will read the ID3 information very fast! My library currently sits at 52kb. It only reads ID3 tags, but it reads all the versions. My next step is to make it write ID3v2.4.0 and ID3v1.1 tags. I’m not going to add support for writing ID3v2.3.0 or ID3v2.2.0 tags. I may allow the option to append the ID3v2.4.0 tag, instead of removing the old one. That’s just a thought. I would rather have the older tags be removed and just have ID3v2.4.0 and ID3v1.1.

I know a couple of you guys out there are eager to try out my library. I would say I’m at version 0.5. It’s easy to parse TEXT tags, but binary tags, like the Image tag, I don’t have support for decompressing the JPEG or any other format yet. I’m definitely not going to write my own image decompresser. If there’s code already available, then I’ll just use that, if not, you will still have access to the raw byte array of the JPEG image in memory, so you can use your own library to decompress/compress it.

Once I have tested my current build (0.5), I will release the library and I’ll provide some sample code on how to use it. It’s pretty simple. You can read all the tags/information with just two lines of code. Hopefully, I’ll get done with my work project so I can work on this more.

Before I went to Wal-Mart I had never even heard of that name. I stepped foot inside Wal-Mart after 3 years, because it opened up close to my house and they obviously had lower prices for some things. So I walked into the electronics section, as I always do when I go to any store. I was like “Vizio, what the hell is that?” I thought it was some cheap brand that will die out in a couple months.

I was wrong! They would’ve died if it wasn’t for Wal-Mart. When Vizio picked Wal-Mart to be their retailer, they had a reason. Wal-Mart has the biggest market. They get tens of millions of customers each day. Vizio has been gaining speed fast. They are catching up to Samsung and Sony for the biggest LCD TV manufacturer. But Vizio still has some more to go with quality. They are priced lower because they have slighly lower quality. They’re not horrible though. If you want to see horrible take a look at any American brand TV (RCA, Polaroid, etc). Vizio is American, but it’s good. It just needs to keep getting better.

Vizio has become a threat to other retailers. BestBuy is selling their private label Insignia HDTVs in direct competition to Vizio. Goto BestBuy.com and search for Vizio. You will get a nice little notice that says “we do not carry Vizios, but we do carry Insignias”. I saw several Vizio’s at Costco the other day and they looked as good as the Sonys (Samsung still the best!).

If you’re looking for a cheap HDTV, so you don’t have to worry about buying a new one (because it was cheap), go with Vizio. It is good for a secondary HDTV somewhere in the house. If someone breaks it, no biggie. I’d like to know what Vizio has planned for the future. My guess is that they are working on a QuadHD panel, or one of the bigger players will give Vizio the contract to manufacture the panel for them.  I’m thinking Sony, they always contract stuff out to the little guys.

There’s an easy way to get your local channels free in HD. Just get a HDTV antenna. Instead of paying $5-$10 extra per month to get local channels, just invest in a HDTV antenna. The HDTV antenna isn’t for everyone. If you are too far away from the broadcasting station, you will have trouble picking up some or all the channels.

I like the Terk HDTVi VHF/UHF HDTV Indoor Antenna. It’s cheap and it’s good. But it’s up to you, you can read the reviews and decide for yourself. You can also look at the other antennas they have. If it doesn’t work then you can return it. The antennas are mainly good if you are in a city, since that is where most broadcasting stations are. Spending $20-$40 on an antenna is better than paying your satellite/cable company for it. The charge you at least $5/mo. for local channels.

This was a short article. I just wanted to get it out because not a lot of people know of this option. Enjoy your sports in HD!

It’s quite clear that plasma is loosing it’s ground to LCD. I never thought plasma TVs had any chance to begin with. The first flat-panel TV I saw was a Pioneer plasma at BestBuy. It looked nice, but cost $13,000! There weren’t any LCDs there. After a year, it was down to about $9,000, if I remember correctly. This is when LCD TVs started coming out. Currently plasmas are cheaper than LCDs, but there’s a reason. They aren’t as good as LCDs. Let’s do a comparison.

Advantages

Cost - Today you can find plasmas a lot cheaper than a LCD for the same size. Cost is important because you’re paying for it.

Size - You can get plasma’s larger than 52″ for a good price. There are only a couple LCDs out that are larger than 52″. One is the Samsung LNT5781Fwhich is 57″, and the other is a Sony KDL-70XBR3, which is 70″. But it seems like Sony will stop making those. Buy the 70″ as fast as you can because it’s only $32,999.00. Or you can buy a car, your loss.

Disadvantages

Heat - Plasmas create a lot of heat, more than CRTs. More heat means more wear, which shortens the life of the parts. It’s the same thing with computers. If you don’t ventilate them, they will run 5-10 degrees celcius higher and it will shorten the lifespan. The current half-life rating of plasmas is around 60,000 hours. Compared to 20,000 a couple years back. They accomplished it by shifting the pixels over a certain interval. This is unnoticeable to the eye because it’s a minor shift. It shifts about 1-3 pixels in a single direction. This reduces the time each pixel stays active.

Burn In - Burn in is common to plasmas, CRTs, and LCDs. But plasmas are easily affected. If the image doesn’t change on the screen for 30 minutes or more, then it will burn in to the screen. The brighter the image, the stronger (easily noticeable) the burn in. LCDs take longer to burn in, even then it’s hard to notice. You can easily see a burn in if you display a solid light-gray image.

Power Consumption - Plasmas use as much power as CRTs, and some times more. The power consumption for plasmas is around 200-240 watts. CRTs are in about the same range. LCDs usually range in 130-175 watts. It depends on the size of the TV. The new LED LCDs use less power.

Fragile - Plasma screens have a glass panel. You have to be careful because it can crack and cause the gas to escape. No gas means no TV. LCDs have a plastic material screen, and plastic can absorbe stress and return back to it’s shape. Some older LCDs had a protective glass layer, but if it cracked your TV would still work.

Conclusion

The biggest concerns are heat and power consumption. Heat and power consumption go together. The more power it uses, the more heat you get. Within a couple years plasmas will cease to exist. LCDs evolved faster, and overcame it’s drawbacks faster than the plasma technology. If you want a cheap TV and don’t mind upgrading in 5 years, you can go for it. Don’t get comfortable with LCD either, there are two technologies that are emerging, SED and OLED. Stay tuned…

You’re at the store looking to buy a HDMI, A/V, or Component cables. You see some that are $10, $20, $30…but then you see one that is $120. You are thinking WTF?! You start reading the package and it talks about how much quality you get with it and how it’s nitrogen injected to keep the naughty electromagnetic interference out. You decide to ask a salesperson just to make sure, and he says “Yeah, you’ll get the best quality with that”. So which one do you buy?

A. $10 cable
B. $20 cable
C. $30 cable
D. $120 Monster Cable

If you answered D, you are an idiot! The correct answers were A, B, or C. When we’re dealing with short lengths of cables almost any cable will do. Except for those cheap $2 ones that are very thin and have cheap connectors. Most setups at home require a 6ft. (2m) cable. A short cable will not easily pick up interference, which is good. It’s only when you’re going at about 100ft. or more that you need higher quality cables. Even then I would not think of buying a Monster Cable. They are overly priced. If you want to buy good cables, go for Belkin or another brand with satisfied customers. If you don’t know if a brand is good, check online. Check customer reviews on consumer electronics sites.

You can go and ask your Physics professor. He will tell you that it doesn’t make a big difference. You don’t need a super conducive material to get electricity to flow. Electricity flows through almost any metal. It’s only when you get up to 1000ft. or more that you think about material’s conductivity. And if you were running a cable that long, you could just increase the voltage. Of course, your audio video devices don’t have a voltage setting you can change. I was just giving you a scenario.

Electricity moves at the speed of light, so you have nothing to worry about with your 50ft setups. If you have any questions, comments, or just want to argue, feel free to post.

Booh! Now that I have your attention, let’s begin our lesson. You’re familiar with HDTV right? Good! What you may not know is that when HDTV first came out it was 1280×720 pixels (0.9 megapixels). It looked pretty good. Then a few years lated they came out with something called FullHD, which is 1920×1080 pixels (2.1 megapixels). This is what HDTV was originally designed for, but because of the cost of producing TVs at that resolution was ahead of its time. Now there’s something called Quad HD, which is 4x the size of FullHD. Quad HD is 3820×2160 (8.1 megapixels). Hope you’re not getting dizzy with all the numbers.

I was surprised to learn that Quad HDTVs are already being produced, but only for exclusive business that can afford them (*cough* oil companies *cough*). What was even more surprising was that Westinghouse was manufacturing them. There is a bigger player who showed off their Quad HDTV. Samsung displayed it’s massive 82″ Quad HDTV at the Society for Information Display (SID) International Symposium.

I love Samsung. They make the coolest TVs at reasonable prices. Do NOT buy a Sony! A premium (XBR5) Sony will cost you twice as much as a premium (A750) Samsung.

Back to the topic of Quad HDs. With that 82″ Quad HD, you’ll be able to put your nose to the screen and still not be able to see the pixels. If you’ve never seen how a pixel looks before, now is the time. Locate a LCD TV near you and put your nose against it. Turn the TV on, and you will see what a pixel is. It is a square dot. Those tiny dots make up a picture, kind of like a mosaic. It’s getting harder and harder to see pixels even on FullHD screens, which is a good thing.

It’ll probably be at least 5 years before we start to see Quad HDTVs. No need to worry about your FullHD TV being outdated anytime soon. But for God’s sake, don’t buy a Sony. Sony’s are good, but they cost more than they are supposed to.

Release Date: June 12, 2008 (Official)

Get ready for the last installment from Hideo Kojima. Alarmed?! You’ve should’ve kept more tabs on the progress of this series. Hideo Kojima said that this was going to be his last time directing the Metal Gear series. We don’t know what he’s going to do after that, but this game could put PS3 1st in the race. We’ve got the Wii leading the pack. In February and March, the PS3 was able to surpass the X-Box 360 to take 2nd place. The only two saviors of the PS3 are Metal Gear Solid 4 and Gran Turismo 5. (Don’t get me started on GT5. I know the graphics are GOOD, but I like my cars to be able to turn like in real life.)

To celebrate the release of the game, there’s going to be a special edition of the PS3. It will feature a military green color for the console unit and the controller as well. Don’t forget that this will debut the DualShock 3 controller. Many say that dual-shock capability was left out because it would throw off the Sixaxis sensor, and they are WRONG. It was removed because of a patent lawsuit.

I am kind of disappointed in the graphics of this game. They look “paperish”. They do not use the full potential of the PS3’s capability. But we can be sure that they will not affect our game play experience. The story will definitely be strong as usual and we can expect new game play features. Metal Gear Solid 3 was a blast! At first I was disappointed that the “radar” was gone, but it made the game much more fun. Not having the radar puts you more in the game and gets your heart pounding. I still get freaked out by the alerts. Whenever I’m playing at night I’m constantly looking back behind my sofa.

I’m more worried about the stealthy-ness of this game. How much stealth can you get on a fired up battlefield? Big gamer sites have been saying in parts of the game you are able to assist the “rebels” and they will not shoot you. So you are out in the open shooting the cyborgs. If you’re doing that half of the time, it doesn’t make it “tactical espionage action”. Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 had a very good stealth factor. The first one was good also, but didn’t seem much fun.

Click here for “Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots” details.
Click here for “Playstation 3 Dualshock 3 Wireless Controller” details.

This sucker actually did it! It copied one of my DVDs with no errors. I’ve used a bunch of other programs and none have been able to copy it without errors. What used to happen was that the files would be copied, but when I tried to edit the DVD structure, I would get this weird error. I thought it could be scratches on the disc, but there weren’t any scratches. I finally found something that worked on that DVD. It’s a big relief for me to be able to backup one of my favorite and hard to find DVDs. So I’m promoting this software. Click the link below to visit the website.

http://www.dvdfab.com

On top of being able to rip the DVD error-FREE, I was able to convert it to the iPod format from the same program. You can rip to other formats, like MPEG4, PSP, Zune, and X360 too. It makes it easier to just have it all in one, instead of having to use another program to convert the ripped DVD to your portable format.

I give it a 5/5.