I am currently in the market to buy a new home audio system, which presents a few problems for me.
In the past, I’ve been of the opinion that your audio equipment should be completely separate from your video equipment: the additional splitters used in the all-in-one home theater systems could cause noise and signal delay problems. In addition, you’d be stuck with a monolithic solution that would eventually stop being up-to-date when either the audio or video components became outdated. They should be separate and connected via S/PDIF, I always said.
For the most part, this was true, especially …read more

We’ve all run into that situation: You’re watching something on TV (usually cable or satellite) and your program is quiet and goes to a commercial (OxyClean anyone? “BAM!”) and your ear drums have ruptured, with a pending lawsuit on the way to the cable networks. Well, Toshiba and Dolby Labs have come up with a new technology to help level out those differences, and my main comment? It’s about time.
Due to the nature of human hearing, many subtleties of the content can be lost when listening at low audio levels. To address this problem, Dolby Volume continually analyzes the audio …read more