Audio Visual Blog

I know everyone here loves their television sets.  I own the 65″ Mitsubishi Flat Screen and am blown away by it.  Sure, the speakers aren’t the greatest thing, but that’s ok.  And I sure don’t mind the qualityof the speakers if I’m smoking shisha tobacco out of my favorite hookah.   Yes, my xbox games look amazing on my TV, but in the end, who really cares because I’m usually too busy taking huge hits from my amazing hookah.  Seriously, if you haven’t smoked shisha before, you absolutely must try it.  I get more jazzed about my hookah than my favorite speakers or stereo system at this point.  Although I must say they all are a wonderful combination. Shisha is seriously a great past time and hasbecome extremely popular in the USA and UK over the past few years.

If you’re interested in getting into the shisha culture which is super cool, I recommend your first stop be Hookah-Pipe.com as it is not only a wonderful site, but it also lets you buy anything shisha related whether you’re in the USA or UK which is where most of the reader of this blog are from.  We got you covered guys, don’t worry!  They’ve got some seriously cool looking hookah’s to go in your media room with your stereo, TV, surround sound speakers, and all that other crazy expensive stuff I know you guys have invested in.

Another amazing site when it comes to the shisha culture is shishatobacco.eu which is especially great when it comes to our UK readers. It’s amazing how easy it is to buy shisha related stuff online and how incredibly cheap it is.  It’s certainly a heck of a lot less expensive than the vast majority of your audio visual equipment, that’s for sure.  Remind me again, how much did you pay for that camcorder?  Yeah, that’s what I thought.  Now don’t skimp on your hookah or shisha pipe either because you’ll regret is just as much as if you bought a low quality camcorder.

The last great shisha site I wanted to give a serious shout out to is shishapipes.eu which I’ve bought a ton of high quality goods from without ever having a problem.  They’re like the amazon of hookah and shisha related stuff.  You just can’t go wrong.  So seriously guys, one of the best additions to your audio visual and home threater setup is a great 4-8 person hookah.  Think about how cool it would be to have all the guys over watching the big game or a movie marathon, downing good beer, eating great food, and everyone smoking some shisha.  You’ll be the most popular hangout in no time at all.  And let’s get serious here, as much as you spent on that high definition TV setup, it could definitely use a little bit more usage.

When I’m in Las Vegas, believe it or not, one of the things I love most is walking around the casinos and listening to all of the great music from the various slot machines that are out there. It’s like music to my ears. I’m sure many of you can’t believe this, but hey, I do own a website dedicated to audio and visual, so I must get off on this stuff. Anyway, I like the music of Las Vegas slot machines so much that I decided to find some of them online to play. I hooked up my top notch speakers to my computer, made sure my monitor was perfectly synced, and searched for my favorite Las Vegas slots. To my dismay, most of them are not yet available online. How crazy is that? However, I DID find a few absolutely wonderful slots instead that I wanted to share with my favorite audiophiles out there.

The first I wanted to share were these Monopoly Slots. The visuals and music are fantastic in my opinion. Who needs Vegas when you can sit at home in your underwear with a cool beer and play these slots and listen to the great music and watch the fantastic graphics on your brand new computer monitor? I don’t know that Vegas will ever see me back!

The second set of super awesome slots I found are these Cleopatra Slots. Hahah, how cool are they? If you don’t think they’re great then either your monitor or speakers or graphic card are out of date because I think they’re absolutely fantastic. And goodness knows I have good taste otherwise this website wouldn’t be as popular as it is, now would it?

And finally, probably the best new slots I found are these Wheel of Fortune Slots. I’ll let them speak for themselves. Is Vanna White not the hottest mom on television by the way? She looks as good as the first time she ever started turning those letters. Sorry for the tangent, but you know me. Anyway, thank goodness I was able to find these great online slots otherwise I might have thrown my computer monitor and speakers out the window. Of course, that would have given me a great excuse to buy a new one. Hmmmm.

Good grief do I have a story for you.  I needed to buy new audio speakers for my stereo and a dog crate for my ever growing puppy the other day.  As the speakers didn’t have to be high quality as I was just going to give the stereo to a friend, I decided to head to Wal Mart for my dog crate and stereo outing.  To make a long story short, what I didn’t realize was that it was Black Friday.  Yes, I’m that stupid sometimes.  I think I got trampled over by 30 women who wanted nothing more than to buy a TV for $30.00 less than necessary.  I got the last of the dog crates but I think I might have committed a felony doing do.  It wasn’t pretty, my friends.

Now, I’m not someone who is always tired, but after this shopping experience, I sure as heck was.  All I wanted to do was sit down and listen to some music while putting my new dog crate together.  Of course, I then realized that in my haste to get the heck out of that store, I had forgotten to purchase my new stereo speakers.  To say that I was upset would be a severe understatement.

I was so tired that the idea of heading back to the store made me cringe. But then I remembered that I had some provigil so I popped some. Talk about the perfect solution to being tired! It’s like I was ready for anything at that point. Off I went to Wal Mart with a new swing in my stride and before I knew it, I was back home listening to my wonderful music and had a new dog crate that my dog absolutely loves. What a crazy day!

I built a HTPC about 5 years ago, and its starting to show its age. It an older Celeron, with about 512MB RAM, and a Haupaunge cap card, running XP Media center and SageTV. It can’t do HD, and it chokes on a lot of XVID and DIVX movies these days. Since then, I’ve got a nice Dish Network HD dual tuner box, so I don’t need TV recording.

This week, Costco sent out a coupon book, and my wife asked about one of these:
http://www.costco.com/Browse/Produc…Prodid=11277556

I’m still weary of Iomega, <CLICK CLICK CLICK, DEAD>.

Any opinions on this item? I’d like it to have DIVX6 support, and a network interface, but for $160, I’m willing to give it a try.

Any other “HD multimedia drives” I should look at?

A maximum resolution of 480p doesn’t seem that great to me. Plus, like you said, Iomega doesn’t have the best reputation in the world.

One option might be to upgrade the HTPC. It shouldn’t be very expensive, especially reusing components. This Gigabyte 780G mobo, one of AMD’s new low-power Athlon X2s, and a couple gigs of RAM comes out to just over $200. Reuse your hard drive, case, peripherals, OS license, and such, and you’ve got a system with a new lease on life. It should have enough power for most XVID-type stuff, and the onboard video has decoding acceleration for H264.

If this should go in the iPod megathread, please let me know and I will close this immediately.

My dad’s birthday is coming up and my mom and I want to get him some portable speakers for his iPod. Everything I’ve looked at so far seems to be ~$150 or under, which is fine. I’m sure that the sound quality of any of these will be shit, but I don’t think he’ll be able to tell the difference or care. What I’m looking for is anyone’s experience with a speaker dock that is reliable, simple to use, and of decent build for the money. I’m also interested in models that would be available in brick-and-mortar stores like Best Buy, the Apple store, etc. I’d order something online to save a little bit of money, but I’m not confident it would get there in time.

The best source of reviews for iPod speaker docks is http://ilounge.com/

I have the Logitech Pure-Fi Elite, which isn’t portable but sounds pretty good for (at the time) $120. It’s $142 now on Amazon.

I recommend getting the Logitech Pure-Fi Anywhere, which can be run from the wall or the rechargeable battery. It’s $55 after rebate on Amazon, just get 1 or 2 day shipping and you’re set.

I’m currently looking for a video camera as we are expecting and aren’t sure where to start.I’d ideally like something that is HD (720p is fine) with good sound pickup and is lightweight/handheld. As far as storage medium, battery life is where I am most lost.

I appreciate any information or recommendations as to specific cameras.

The new Sonys are pretty nice. There are hard drive, mini DV and direct-to-memory stick versions.

Amazon.com has them all and at decent prices.

For small size, nothing seems to beat the memory stick models, as there essentially are no moving parts other than for the lens focus and zoom. Obviously, a hard drive uses up battery power, as does tape transport. On the other hand, the compression is a bit more lossy on the memory stick models than on the mini-DV.

If you want some sample footage from the new HD camcorders I found this website http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/d…21/vcam2008.htm. Just click on the japanese text below the camera names instead of the actual camera name. They have samples of both indoor and outdoor footage. From what I’ve seen the canon and the sony are both really good while the panasonic and jvc aren’t that clear.

I have googled and everything to try to find the right term, but with no luck. Basically my picture from my TV is cut off by an inch or 2 at all sides. It is a 52 inch Sony, rear projection. I am afraid I bought it second hand and don’t know alot about it more than that. It was fine at first but it has gotten worse over time. It seems as though the projection is for a 54 inch TV, when the screen is 52 inch. I hope I am explaining this correctly, but this is all I got. For instance, text in the bottom right of the screen generally has a few characters cut off.I googled calibrating and maintence, but this all seems to just deal with color calibration. Is there something I can do to fix this? Hire someone? Its becoming more and more annoying.

You have what is called overscan and it is normal on all rear projection sets, it can be especially bad if its a crt rear projection. If you really want to do something you will need to have someone come out and calibrate it but they will probably never get you to zero overscan. You can mess with it yourself but you run the risk of really screwing stuff up.

Not sure if you goons have used this before, but hopefully you guys will be able to help me out here.
Anyway, to give some background information.
I mainly use a Logitech Z-5500 for my console gaming. But you as know, apartment, wargames, late night gaming, just don’t go well with anyone. So I have been plugging my ATH-900 headphone into Z-5500 decoder at night.Now that I read about the SU-DH1 system, I have a few questions.
First of all, I am no audiophile to start with (I cant tell differences in sound quality when it comes to high-end stuff)
With that out of the way, will I be able to get a large improvement when I upgrade to SU-DH1 system? i.e. when compared to having the headphones plugged directly into Z-5500’s decoder. Also, how do ATH-900 and SU-DH1 combination usually sound in comparison to a real 5.1 system?

Also, is audiocubes the only retailer to acquire this device if I am located in Canada?

Lastly, is this set up: SU-DH1+ATH-900 a good idea to start with? or do you guys have any superior recommendation for an alternative set-up at this price range?

I don’t know how it’s done, but DHP is pretty well regarded. Here’s a demo, and an episode of MacBreak Weekly recorded in DHP.

Sounds pretty good to me.

Kind of related, this reminded me that I haven’t used any kind of headphone crossfeed since going back to Winamp. Searching around, the Bauer stereophonic-to-binaural DSP sounds the best to me. It would be interesting to compare this to DHP for stereo listening as Dolby adds ambient room information to the mix.

I’m thinking about buying one of these for my mother-in-law. Does anyone care to share their experiences with the products since I know nothing about them?

tons of them are widescreen, which makes no goddamn sense for photos (most digital photos are a 3:2 ratio). But hey, slap WIDSCREEN all over the box and it will probably sell better. I would love to see a 3:2 digital photo frame, but such a speciality LCD would likely cost a good deal more.

I was shopping for these last Christmas; what I did was load up a memory card with some sample photos and actually tried out the frames on display at Best Buy, CompUSA, etc. Best Buy had the greatest variety of frames on display and running. I had some full-size (10 megapixels in my case), resized, portrait, and landscape photos on the memory card. A lot of frames render large photos very slowly, but this can be remedied by only putting resized photos on the frame. Be sure to put some photos on that will test the color fidelity of these frames, as you don’t want a nice sunset photo to be ruined by harsh color banding.

Be sure to look at what transition effects are available, randomization (some frames can only display photos sequentially!), and cropping options (black bars or blow up the photo to fill the frame, which cuts off edges).

The new Sony frames are awesome. We’re carrying them where I work, and they blow the only other decent one’s - Kodak’s - completely out of the water. It may sound silly, but they just seem…better. Even the build on them is nicer - the Sony logo gently glows white, and the frame has a nice hefty weight to it. I know the 7″ has a resolution of 800×600.

If you’re looking for a big monitor but are on a tight budget, then look no further than the Optiquest Q22wb 22″ widescreen LCD computer monitor.  This is one big, sexy, quality piece of computer equipment.  The best part is that you won’t sacrifice performance due to the price with this LCD display.  The Viewsonic Q22wb combines high brightness and an amazing 900:1 contrast ratio with and incredibly fast 5MS video response rate for strikingly crystal-clear,  totally blur free video, graphics and text. With the ViewSonic Q22wb, it’s easy to operate in two applications or documents side-by-side, which will naturally improve your productivity levels. It also comes with an integrated power supply and VESA® wall-mount so you can reduce clutter and free up that ever-valuable desktop real estate. If you share workspace, then you can lock in your screen settings with the OSD lock and prevent theft of your prized monitor with the Kensington® security port.  Retail price is around $260.00.

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