Home entertainment equipment: what's new?

Sunset, May, 1988

Home entertainment equipment: what's new?

Analog or digital--which sounds better to you? Does your television minitor have an RGB input? How many lines of horizontal resolution can you get off your laser disk? And just where did you hide your subwoofer?

If all this makes sense to you, go "degauss" yourself and leave the rest of us electronic illiterates to unravel the current revolution in audio and video.

The last few years have seen an unparalleled boom in home entertainment equipment, and the future promises even more new gadgetry and media. Already the public has accepted many of these changes: just 10 years ago, who's have thought a laser would be playing your music, or that you'd be able to rent a movie and watch it on your own TV?

Here, we take a look at what's new with audio and video, and what's to come.

Built-ins will make things simpler

In many cases, these gadgets have become, quite literally, an integral part of the house. Having built-in entertainment equipment, as in the system pictured above, has certain obvious benefits--no stacks of flashing electronic components in your living room, no jumble of wires, more space, less clutter.

Manufactuers have started to market equipment designed specifically for building in, both for new construction and for retrofitting into existing houses. Indeed, in some new housing developments, an inplace entertainment system with wiring throughout the house is one of the available options.

"Spending $6,000 to $60,000 for an elaborate system hurts, but put it in a mortgage and you can't feel it as much," says Russ Maynard, of Golden Pacific Systems in Campbell, California, designer of the system shown on page 177.

TV, VCR, CD: unraveling changes in the electronic alphabet soup

Home electronic entertainment is a big international industry, and, like any other aggressive concern, it"s always introducing new products. Many don't catch on or don't last long--just try buying a reel-to-reel tape player or a quadraphonic recording. Some are superseded by better products: witness how cassettes drove out eight-tracks.

Some products have redefined the market --stereo music and color television, for instance. Two relative newcomers to the home entertainment arena, videocassette recorders and compact disks, may have already reached that status.

When VCRs were introduced in the late '70s, no one dreamed that they'd be used to watch rented, commercial-free movies at home. The initial sell was that you could time-shift television shows, which meant you didn't have to wait till 3 A.M. to catch The Day the Earth Stood Still, or stay home to see your soaps. But rental outlets took off, and watching films is the main allure now, cementing the VCR's place in the market.

CD news, and what's dis about DAT

Compact disk players have found their niche, too. People know the difference between good (high-fidelity) and bad sound. These saucer-size, oddly opalescent disks reproduce sound better than just about anything on the market today.

Why? For one, the sounds on a compact disk are digital recordings, not analogs, as on conventional records and cassettes. This type of recording resembles computer programming, breaking the sound into code bits. The message gets "decoded" (here by a laser)--not read by a needle or tape head. All you hear is pure sound, free of any mechanical interference.

However, audiophiles insist that high-quality analog records (particularly some made during the late '50s and early '60s) still provide the purest sound.

But for most of us, recordings on CDs (or DATs; see below) probably sound best. Also, compact disks can survive some manhandling, so they don't sufer from the clicks and hisses you hear on your scratched LPs and old, overused cassettes.

But disks can't be used to record, and that makes room in the marketplace for the next likely boom in audio entertainment: digital audio tape, or DAT. Expect to see DAT for sale this year, despite efforts by recording companies to block its sale. Unlike a CD (and like a conventional cassette), this format can be used to make your own recordings.

Sound-splitting subwoofers

The speakers in the home theater on page 177, and the ones shown on page 156, divide high and low notes in a new way. In stereo, high notes are directional; you can usually tell exactly where they're coming from--out of the speaker. But bass notes are omnidirectional: you can't pinpoint their source.

In these two speaker systems, all bass notes come out of a "subwoofer." This box houses larger speakers than ones that generate higher notes, but it can be hidden virtually anywhere: built into a wall or floor, tucked under a coffee table, or hidden behind drapes.

The remaining midrange and tweeter (high-note) speakers don't take up much room, so they can be unobtrusively positioned for the best total sound.

Little speakers on the move

Once in a blue moon, changes come that don't take an audio purist to appreciate. Though sound is the main concern, convenience and versatility sometimes get addressed in new products, too.