Category: Consumerism

A group chat in which a friend with a 12,000-square-foot house describes his efforts at updating the home theater with built-in ceiling speakers:

• friend: My house has built in 5.1 speakers in the ceiling, but I assume off-axis sound is crap?
• friend: I really want Dolby Atmos now. It has real 360 degree placement and sky effects.
• friend (1.5 hours later): Bought a Pioneer Elite 11.1 channel Dolby ATMOS receiver. 12 speakers and full virtual sound placement including above you. It’s going to be incredible.
• me: we don’t have a TV

Separately, one of the advantages of living in an apartment complex/small town environment as we do is that kids can do some contemporary anthropology while out on dog walks. The 6-year-old, as part of a not-so-subtle lobbying campaign against domestic tyranny that is preventing him from watching beloved shows and movies, noted that everyone single apartment or house in the neighborhood has a TV and “they even have it on in the morning.” (we had a TV when we lived in Maskachusetts, but also a rule that we couldn’t watch anything until after dark)

Assuming that the kids can prevail over Senior Management, what size TV would make sense in our apartment? We have almost unlimited wall space for the TV. Viewing distance is 8-9′. There is no obvious place for rear channel speakers, so the sound would have to come from the TV itself or maybe some speakers on the furniture that holds up the TV.

THX says (scroll down), “we recommend you measure the distance between your couch and where your TV will be located (in inches). Then multiply that number by .835, and that should help you determine what screen size you should get.” But then they also say “or 4K or UHD TV sets, the process is a little different since the nearer you sit to these models, the more detail you’ll be able to pick up.” (and then they fail to disclose any process!)

The 0.835 factor works out to at least an 80″ TV and it would be at least 4K resolution so actually they are recommending something bigger than 80″ in our 1,950 square foot apartment! Maybe this 77″ LG OLED? Everyone who came over would say “Wow. You guys must really love watching TV!”

SMPTE uses a smaller factor. This calculator shows the alternatives. One could be nearly 11′ back from an 80-inch TV according to SMPTE (i.e., the people who make the movies), but to see every pixel with young eyes you’d want to get up to within 5′ of a 4K TV.

What about a 65″ TV that a more normal family might purchase? The above-cited calculator says that THX recommends sitting no more than 7.2′ away and SMPTE recommends no more than 8.8′ away.

What did my friend buy for his home theater? Sony 77-inch OLED for $3,000. (Runs the Google OS, so in the long run it will protect you from viewing harmful content, e.g., anything that suggests that weekly COVID-19 vaccines are not in an average 8-year-old’s best interest.) He also has an 86-inch LG “nanocell” TV that cost $1,800:

It is great in normal room light. It is tolerable in a dark room for most content. It was horrible for watching Jack Ryan Without Remorse on Netflix, as the entire movie was dark. Once you see the uneven lighting in the blacks, you can’t unsee them.

So, there are two solutions. One is the Samsung Neo QLED, which has enough local dimming to do a good job of helping black areas, but it is so close to the price of an OLED that I don’t think it makes sense, except again for daylight viewing.

For OLED, there are two to consider. Sony and LG. For 77 inch, Sony is $3000, and LG is $2900. For 83 inch, Sony is $8000 and LG is $5300. They are both great, but the Sony has a better processor and comes pre-calibrated. The LG comes set up for sports and needs a bunch of work to make it work as well as the Sony for movies. I ran a poll on a Facebook group for DolbyVision, and people there voted on the Sony by 2:1.

Related:

• Wikipedia article on organic LEDs shows that the earliest producers of practical OLED panels are now irrelevant and/or actually bankrupt (e.g., Kodak (out of bankruptcy with a market cap comparable to a day of sales for the iPhone with its included camera), Pioneer (stopped making TVs in 2010; delisted in 2018), Sanyo (acquired by Panasonic))

“Why It’s Easier to Find Expensive Appliances Than Cheaper Ones” (WSJ):

Whirlpool, GM and other companies are prioritizing higher-price products as they try to offset supply-chain snarls

“There was a day when a customer could walk in the door and buy a secondary piece or a landlord special and have 100 options to choose from,” said Mr. Coughlin, a co-owner of All Shore Appliance in Port Washington, N.Y. “Now it’s more along the lines of, we explain to the customer what we have.”

As the global supply-chain crisis snarls production and bloats manufacturing and shipping costs, companies that make products from lawn mowers to barbecue grills are prioritizing higher-priced models, in some cases making cheaper alternatives harder or impossible to find, company executives, retailers and analysts say.

Some are pushing upscale products in an effort to make up for added labor, shipping and manufacturing costs. Whirlpool Corp., maker of washing machines, KitchenAid mixers and other home appliances, said in July it would shift toward higher-price products as part of a plan to help cover rising costs.

General Motors … stopped making the Chevrolet Malibu midsize sedan for more than six months, but has kept all shifts running at a factory that makes its most expensive SUVs. The average new vehicle in September sold for a record $42,800, up nearly 19% from a year earlier, according to research firm J.D. Power.

Televisions are among items for which cheaper models are becoming scarcer, said Mike Abt, co-president of Chicago appliance seller Abt Electronics. He said the price he pays for appliances is rising and he expects that to continue next year. For the first time he can remember, the price of televisions has actually increased—they typically get cheaper every year.

A tough time to be setting up a new household as a refugee, but perhaps the U.S. Treasury has enough cash to buy the high-end LG front-loaders?

Related:

• for those of us already sick with envy, some additional motivation to support President Biden’s Tax the Rich proposals… “Gulfstream Adds Two Models To Its Large-Cabin Line of Business Jets” (AVweb): The $71.5 million G800 adds 500 nautical miles of range (8,000 NM) to that of its 10-foot-longer, larger-cabin G700 sibling, the in-development $75 million flagship of the Gulfstream fleet scheduled to enter service next year. … At the other end of the scale, the $34.5 million G400 updates the “entry level” of the large-cabin line (the smaller-cabin G280 is classed as super-midsize). The 4,200-NM-range G400 is slated to make its first flight in early 2023.

A couple of months ago: Has anyone tried a book scanning service for Kondoization or pre-move preparation?

I’ve got the first batch of results from 1DollarScan now and the scanned pages are in paper recycling Heaven. This is a review of their cheapest possible service: $1/100 pages and no OCR, no enhancement, and no naming of the files. Mailing books to San Jose via USPS Media Mail costs roughly $1 per book. Once the scans come back, you start with a page like this:

I downloaded them, opened each up to see what it was, and then renamed the file using Windows File Explorer. I then let my state-of-the-art PC (circa 2015) do a batch OCR via Adobe Acrobat Pro (a few clicks and then 4 hours of runtime for 28 books). Maybe due to watermarking, the files are epic in size, 70-100 MB for a regular book-type book and 200-300 MB for the technical manuals and cookbooks. A couple of the books hit 400 MB, but were reduced in size somewhat after the OCR process. (If you want to preserve the original quality from 1dollarscan, use the “Searchable Image (Exact)” setting for OCR in Acrobat; that leaves the scans unmolested and just builds the OCR database in a separate data structure behind it.) The Acrobat Pro Preflight tool says that the images within the PDFs are “300 ppi”.

How do the scans look? Here’s a book on bicycle maintenance that I thought would be tricky:

A cheaply printed book with 40 years of acid destroying the pages (how to slice a banana without peeling using needle and thread):

A book where the color is not from the acid:

A Wall Street Journal book on estate planning (timely topic now that the Democrats say they are working to change all of the rules!) in which color is used as a sidenote background:

(If your child lives in Massachusetts, a family court predator can easily take all of the trust assets via child support (over the 23-year period during which child support is ordered, not all in one lump). A parent creating a trust in Nevada or South Dakota cannot necessarily undo the child’s mistake of being exposed to the family courts in other states. Your child can simply be put in prison by the judge (“contempt of court”) unless the amount ordered is paid, either by the child or by the trust and therefore it may not matter, from a practical point of view, what the trust documents say.)

Perhaps the toughest challenge of all, some handwritten bound journals from the late 1980s. Some notes on a finite-state machine implemented in Programmable Array Logic (PALs). I think this is for reading the bits from and syncing the clock to a digital audio output of a CD player.

There wasn’t much they could do about my handwriting, but the scans are sharp and zooming in from the PDF should be just as good for deciphering as having the physical page (not that I have the physical page anymore).

So far, I would say that this service delivered everything promised.

More:

• 1DollarScan.com

I stopped by Goodwin’s High End, an audio store that has been going reasonably strong since 1977. Coronapanic has been great for business. Governors helpfully locked people into their homes where they had little else to do other than seek maximum sound quality. “We have customers in all 50 states now,” said Alan Goodwin.

What’s state of the art in turntables these days? A $120,000 Basis:

What if you want to listen to digital? You download, maybe from hdtracks.com, to a local specialized server and connect that to a microwave-sized D/A converter:

Streaming is generally best for browsing rather than critical listening, but if you must stream, Tidal and Qobuz are reasonable options.

Electrostatic speakers are no longer in. It is all about dynamic speakers, individually priced only slightly more than a new car.