Hi all,

A bit of a confession; these past few months I’ve been only noting the headlines of your the AV Rant podcasts in my email Inbox, not listening or reading all of them.

But “Weighing Receivers” caught my eye/mind….

A bigger power supply will of course mean more power, so the difference between model A10 and A11 – for example – if both weigh the same, is basically nothing; especially if the specs claim the second has a much higher power rating and costs more. This is budget receivers, of course.

However I’ve been keeping my eye out for receivers with digital Class D power amps in them. Saw the first one recently and I focused on the distortion rating I’ve been checking around for a long time but not failed to find. This one was rated at 1.0% THD instead of the more usual 0.5%. And of much lower weight for it’s size. Class D amps are much more efficient than the usual Class ABs commonly used. Class D amps are – until now hopefully – mainly used in public address systems.

Well, I believe that the distortion caused by digital compression (aka MP3s) that so many “audiophiles” love, is MUCH higher than the additional 0.5% that a Class D receiver will add. Class D? I’ve been waiting for you these long few years! My ideal system? A Class D amped sub-woofer and a bi-amped receiver with a Class D for the low and mid range and a Class AB (or A!) for the high range.

I predict the next AV receiver manufacturer out there who brings out such a unit will kill the AV market (you read it here first).

Cheers!
skris88
Sydney, Australia

Revision3.com is run by several folks from ZDTV/TechTV/G4, most of them are from the old show called The Screensavers.

I’ve only listened to half of this episode, but Tom and Dina are cracking me up 😀 First – Tom saying that Ziv doesn’t own any Bose equipment, which means that he and Tom may still talk to one another: that sure made me laugh! Then Dina went and flat out broke the fourth wall! How can I resist?

Sprang vs. Sprung:

“Sprang” is the past tense of “spring”. So you would “spring” forward now or in the future, but you “sprang” forward last Sunday.

“Sprung” is the past participle of “spring”. So because we “sprang” forward last Sunday, Spring (the season) has now “sprung”. 😉

I’m a little bit surprised that Tom thought Hulu, Netflix and the like are available outside of the US, although I can understand how he may have been under that impression.

So much of our television and movie content in Canada comes from the US, but the CRTC still blocks access to a great amount in our Great White North. Hulu, Netflix, Vudu, NBC, CBS and ABC.com are all inaccessable unless we to to the hassle of obtaining a US IP address. The Canadian Playstation Network, Xbox Live and iTunes all have considerably less content available unless, again, we go to the trouble of setting up a fake US account. As such, Internet streaming and downloading of movies and TV shows is much more difficult to achieve in a legal fashion. Sadly though, even bittorrent is not a sufficient replacement because if the standard 60GB caps imposed by all of our ISP companies!

It is ironic that the Canadian federal transition to all digital television transmission won’t occur until 2011 because per capita, we are much better prepared already than the US. Very few people in Canada are without cable or satellite service. In addition to having very few legal online options, we also have far fewer over the air stations available.

We get by up here, but it is definitely a different situation than in the US. Just don’t get me started on our cell phone providers! Good golly! Talk about having to pick the least worst option with that bunch!

Rev 3 podcasts are available in pretty high quality formats that can be downloaded via RSS feed. That’s how I get my geek on to watch them. Actually looks decent on a decent size HDTV, unlike some of the other ways they are available (they have a YouTube Channel, stream from their own sites, etc)

I like Tekzilla, Digg Nation, occasionally Totally Rad Show or Systm and may check out the new Co-op game podcast.

As Drako60 said, Revision 3 is has a lot of owners and talent from the old Screensavers show. Additionally, one of the owners (Kevin Rose) is also an owner of digg.com .

I wish I could insert a pic of the old NBC “The More You Know” PSAs here 🙂

Hi Rob,

I’m in Canada too so I can’t get access to those website alors but I’m not sure I agree that it’s because of the CRTC. I would tend to think it’s more a business thing between US compagnie producing that content and the money they can make with Canadien broadcast compagnies.

That said, I wanted to let you know Rob that I know one ISP that doesn’t have any bandwith limits, AEI internet. It’s DSL services so it’s not the best but I’m with them since many years and it works really well for downloading. It’s 30$ a month, no contracts, no bandwidth limit, for a 5mbps connection on DSL.

Tom and Dina, love the podcast so keep up the good word. By the way Dina, your french prononciation of “Denon” is perfect. 🙂

You may be right, alexend. I know for sure that the iTunes situation is because of the CRTC though. It’s the same old, tired “you must have x % amount of Canadian content” argument that we always hear from the CRTC with that particular case.

The streaming websites are an advertising thing. The ads shown have to be seperatelt approved for Canada. It’s not like there’s any ban on streaming. Our CTV.ca, thecomedynetwork.ca and others offer streaming – much of it being US content. So that seems to he mostly about having a destinct Canadian website with Canadian ads being shown.

I’m in Canada as well and if anyone wants to watch Hulu (not sure about other sites as I haven’t tried them) you can try this app… http://www.hotspotshield.com/ … I wish there was something like this for my PS3 as well but at least I can hook my laptop up to my TV and watch that way. Hope this helps.

YYYYEEEEESSSSS!!!! it is Done. I have finally cought up with the podcasts!!!

Thnks for covering the BassTraps question. Now I will go to my front yard and try to catch a bass with a box and a stick to a string! lol LOL

Love the show guys. ….Dina what can I say, lol.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane Raul, I think we have all done what you did to some degree or another. I was not quite as vocal as you :). I thank you for comments as you went through the old rants.

Now, however, you are in the same boat as the rest of us, waiting and waiting for the next podcast. I for one am looking into this Twitter thing to get notified early. Hopefully now we will see our stars on video. I haven’t been able to slip that new ipod into the Costco cart yet, the wife is watching pretty close these days…

The other Tom

To Tom and Dina,

These rants can be as long as you can make them, all of my devices have pause buttons, so you are good to go!

Just had another flash of brilliance. How about a Canadian only contest!!! Maybe a some great Canadian company could send the prize out directly? Throw us a bone, anything? We have a ton of great speaker manufacturers up here, or maybe SVS could use they’re SonicBoomAudio connections. SVS has great T shirts.
Did you steal that HTML from HT Guys site yet for those Starbucks donations?

Too much caffeine.
Another Tom