In the news —

Star Wars Episode VII has a title:

“The Force Awakens”

What’s your reaction?

http://www.starwars.com/films/star-wars-episode-vii-the-force-awakens

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In the news —

Toy Story 4 will hit theaters in June 2017.

John Lasseter will be back to direct. Rashida Jones & Will McCormack are the writers.

What say you? Happy to see the story continue? Or was Toy Story 3 your perfect ending?

http://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/toy-story-4-is-coming-to-theaters-in-2017?bftw=main

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In the news —

Bruce Campbell and Sam Raimi will both be back for a 10 episode TV show on Starz:

Ash Vs. The Evil Dead

Groovy.

http://io9.com/bruce-campbell-will-star-in-evil-dead-sequel-tv-series-1656995220

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In the news —

Aereo isn’t totally dead yet. But as of November 12, they shut down their Boston office and paid off all 43 employees who were working there.

http://www.engadget.com/2014/11/06/aereo-tells-boston-employees-its-shutting-down-november-12th/

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AV Rant Listener Gaylen —

replaced his broken Onkyo TX-SR805 AV Receiver with a Denon AVR-X4000. But for those who would like to stick with Onkyo, it’s well worth it to check if your Onkyo potentially falls under Onkyo’s “no sound/no network” warranty coverage, which they’ve extended until 2018 for many models sold between 2009 and 2012.

You can read the details here:

http://www.uk.onkyo.com/en/articles/customer-care-program-119261.html

And for North American customers, you can check your claim here:

https://repair.onkyousa.com/na/

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AV Rant Listener Efrain M. —

has been keeping us up to date on the LH Labs Geek Pulse Headphone DAC + Amp.

Efrain shared a couple of interesting videos about their design choices and demonstrating how their optional tube buffer stage changes the measurements.

Design Video: http://youtu.be/HIAqtblSmjQ

Tubes Video: http://youtu.be/1LgNsm-bHG8

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AV Rant Listener Shane T. —

got in touch with SVS to ask them how to disable the annoyingly bright blue LED on the front of their subwoofers.

If you’re willing to unscrew the amplifier, there’s a simple connector for the LED that you can unplug, and SVS provided a manual to show exactly how to unscrew the amplifier and get at the inside:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B86E1hpT2ccLcjkzZTVwbzQ1cTlKdmxTNkxPbUdNSnFual9J/edit?usp=drive_web

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AV Rant Listener Shane T. —

told us about openELEC – the Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center software – which is a FREE Linux distro that will run on just about any computer and turn it into a stable media center based on XBMC.

Check it out here: http://openelec.tv/

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AV Rant Listener Jose S. —

took us to task over some of our comments and recommendations regarding 2-channel setups.

In our response, we mentioned the Harman International PDFs of the notes from a series of lectures by Dr. Floyd Toole about The Science of Audio.

The very beginning of the first PDF describes how we ended up with 2-channel in the first place.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B86E1hpT2ccLN2tyQnRoMTJwRlhVZk8yNlFJVnRhOEdUZS13/view?usp=sharing

And if you’d like to read the notes from the rest of the lecture series, here are the links:

Part 2:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B86E1hpT2ccLT0JDdjBJaHFESjl0Sy1SUnV6T0hHeGg4c2kw/view?usp=sharing

Part 3:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B86E1hpT2ccLdmFPaVQzOFNaT0hsX1lhc21KQklQVVczRHRv/view?usp=sharing

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AV Rant Listener Nico G. —

sent us a link to an Audio Engineering Society (AES) paper regarding the audibility of “high res” audio.

Viewing the full paper will cost $20, but the basic abstract pretty much tells you the results:

http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=14195

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AV Rant Listener Gabe M. —

wants a good way to organize and access all of his music via his computer with the wrinkle that he also enjoys a lot of multi-channel music recordings.

We suggested using the JRiver Media Center software for playback and organization:

http://www.jriver.com/

and using Gracenote, which can integrate with Jriver, for all the artwork and metadata:

http://www.gracenote.com/

But if you have better suggestions, we’d love to hear them! We don’t have a lot of first hand experience with this exact setup, so we’re hoping the AV Rant Community can come through with confirmation or recommendations!

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AV Rant Listener John M. —

sent us a PDF from HD Acoustics and Acoustic Frontiers that aims to create a listening room standard for 2-channel sound:

http://www.acousticfrontiers.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/acoustic_measurement_standards.pdf

We responded on the podcast, so you can hear our thoughts there. But in terms of what this paper recommends for room treatments and decay times, we honestly think it’s great! We just don’t think it’s actually a standard or that limiting ourselves to only two speakers is actually the best way to solve every issue.