March 31, 2002.
Two years ago, I attended the Montreal HI-FI Expo held every year at the Delta hotel and wrote a review of the home theatre set-ups. The review was so long-winded that even I questioned the usefulness of such a ridiculously long document. However, there wasn't any better way to display my frustration in the number of terrible home theatre set-ups that were present at the show. Bad picture, bad sound, bad presentation, closed presentations a.k.a. "fascist demos"...
The presentations have done a complete 180 degree about-face since that fateful weekend two years ago. This time, it was a bit difficult to find a really bad home theatre set-up (note that I said difficult, not impossible). Most of the mistakes committed in the past have been for the most part properly corrected. And whichever inconsistencies weren't fixed this time around could be attributed in many cases to the unstable viewing conditions of a hotel room.
Also, I would like to apologize if I don't furnish any information on the DVD players used in the different home theatre configurations. The varying quality of the display devices presented at this year's show makes a practical evaluation of the different DVD players used in each room pretty much impossible.
The Year of the DLP
One of the more noticeable changes in this year's show is the complete absence of CRT type front projection systems, indicating big expensive CRT type projectors are now on their way out. There have been so many significant improvements in the field of DLP type projectors that they are quickly becoming the front projection system of choice, rendering obsolete LCD, DILA and CRT type projectors. Even the problems inherent in what I call "fixed pixel display devices" are also disappearing. Trying to display the image of one fixed resolution through a projector with a different fixed resolution could produce some undesirable results on screen. However, this year's crop of projectors contain enough video processing circuitry to properly handle most of the more common resolution combinations and produce a very decent image.
If you don't know what DLP stands for, click here. Otherwise, please continue reading.
Of course, not every room was what I would call properly configured, many suffering from excessive stray light and mismatched screen sizes. Still it was much better than what I experienced at the show a couple of years ago where too many rooms were so way off track when it comes to setting up a proper projection system that it was simply too embarrassing to watch. Most of the projectors this time around were properly set up and equipped with a single 1024x768 resolution DMD chip. One projector was equipped with the widescreen HD-1 chip supporting a resolution of 1280x720 pixels suitable for HDTV, but that projector was way too expensive for us peasants. More on that later.
I only have a few beefs concerning this year's edition of the show. The first item is the choice of DVD demo material. The two most popular titles were "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" and "Pearl Harbor", two titles with excellent soundtracks, but whose transfers are riddled with excessive and ugly edge enhancement, producing a horribly unnatural image. The other beef was the lack of information by the manufacturer's representatives. Too often, the representatives knew very little about the equipment they were demonstrating. Some of my questions such as the projector's configuration or even the composition of the sound system were sometimes met with blank stares. Yet this is the kind of information that a knowledgeable consumer would be asking. It can make all the difference in the world when choosing one home theatre package over another.
What about plasma displays?
Too expensive. Forget it.
I'm not kidding! Plasma displays are incredibly expensive and ridiculously inefficient. Their prices can range from $11,000 for a 42" screen, $20,000 for a 50" screen, and so on. To top it off, I've yet to see a plasma screen capable of displaying a proper full color spectrum. Just about every display I've seen suffered from color banding problems. Imagine for a moment that your computer screen's color depth is set to 16 bits mode instead of the 24 bits or "True Color" mode. Display some high resolution outdoor images on the monitor, and portions of the image such as the sky will look like it was assembled with varying strips of blue instead of looking like a nice smooth blue sky. The plasma screen were producing the same type of image, making us believe we were watching a paint-by-number video.
Many exhibits used the plasma displays only so they'd have something to show during their home theatre demos. This was especially the case with the Paradigm exhibit at the Delta where the usual line of audio and home theatre speakers were being presented along with processors and amplifiers by Anthem. Overall, a very pleasing sound as usual. Paradigm has consistent home theatre demonstrations year in, year out. The demo material itself consisted of the Disney movie "Atlantis: The Lost Empire".
The audio/video chain Centre HI-FI occupied part of the lobby of the hotel as usual. This year, their main attraction consisted of wall-to-wall plasma displays, some of them over 50 inches in size, all showing an HD feed from Bell ExpressVu. I was lucky enough to be watching part of a high definition lacrosse broadcast when a fight broke out in the arena! The booth also had a conventional Sony RPTV built inside a huge chunk of furniture. When compared with the plasma displays, the RPTV didn't fare too well mainly because the RPTV wasn't properly calibrated, and the picture quality of most rock concert videos generally stinks. The sound quality of the systems was a bit inconsistent mainly due to the harsh environment of the lobby.
Anyone using conventional TV sets and RPTVs?
Sony occupied one of the big ballrooms on the mezzanine and stuffed it full of their own equipment, both audio and video. Small cubicles were set up as traditional living room accommodations and were equipped with their current line of television sets and compact home theatre components. One item you notice, especially with letterboxed material, is that not a single image from the tube TVs was perfectly horizontal. All the television sets exhibited a slight slant in the displayed image, not necessarily in all four corners at once. One interesting element was the side-by-side comparison of their expensive 16x9 set and one of their traditional 4x3 sets, both of them XBR models. Both sets were tuned to the HDNet high definition broadcast. For some strange reason, the vertically squeezed image on the 4x3 set was more detailed than the same image displayed full screen on the 16x9 set.
Linn had a room demonstrating their home theatre speaker system, using a Loewe widescreen TV as the display device. The quality of the speaker system left me cold, and the center channel sounded muddy. Even worse, during the presentation of a clip from "The Fifth Element", none of the three salespeople in the room could figure out how to set the TV to the "Full" mode. As a result, the image looked awful skinny and stretched out. Hopefully the sales staff wasn't trying to sell the TV.
I want my DLP!
Much of the remaining home theatre exhibits consisted of DLP projectors. And for good reason. From the moment I saw the first DLP exhibit at the Delta, I was hooked.
On the second floor of the Delta, Solution Projecteurs was demonstrating the NEC LT150Z DLP projector, a tiny piece of equipment the size of a compact phone book equipped with a single 1024x768 resolution DMD chip. This tiny projector was fed the high definition PBS loop from a Bell ExpressVu model 6000 receiver set to 720p with the resulting image projected on a typical 100" diagonal 4x3 screen. Although the projector is unable to display the full resolution of the high definition image, it certainly wasn't far off. Better yet, the projector was available at a price tag of $5,200 (replacement lamps are $550 each). On the following days, I was able to catch a glimpse of the movie "The Fifth Element" (still popular even after four years) in both pan & scan and widescreen formats as played back off a computer equipped with a DVD ROM drive and WinDVD playback software. As expected, the pan & scan image was mediocre, but the widescreen presentation was seriously making me think about getting one of these puppies in the near future just to get started.
On the floor above the mezzanine, one room was showing off a DreamVision PerfectVu projector which looked simply horrendous! The pod race scene from "Star Wars: Episode I" lacked so much detail that I suspected the projector was a model with a 800x600 DMD chip. Accompanying the presentation was a set of satellite speakers which pretty much "complimented" the disappointing display: both were below acceptable levels of quality. If anything, this single room showed me why 800x600 resolution projectors should now be avoided. You lose way too much picture information.
While we're talking about satellite speakers, I saw two more rooms with satellite speaker demonstrations, mainly the Acoustic Energy AEG02 series and the Ruark Vista 50 series. Although these two rooms presented satellite speakers of reasonable quality including the subwoofer, these compromises in speaker design simply cost too much money for what they offer. For more or less the same price, a customer can easily buy bookshelf speakers from any of the major budget speaker manufacturers, connect them to a half-decent receiver, and enjoy much better sound while spending a lot less money. Until the price of satellite speakers drops dramatically, I simply can't recommend any of them.
The Holiday Inn DLPs
The Holiday Inn is where the majority of DLP projectors were located. And there was plenty to see!
The first room I saw was a big one featuring JBL speakers, D-Box subwoofers and electronics, a $30,000 Runco Reflection VX1000 DLP projector equipped with the 16x9 HD-1 DMD chip, and a set of J-Mark(?) theatre seats resting on Odyssee motion simulator transducers. The demo material included "Pearl Harbor", and the movement of the seats was synchronized with the soundtrack of the movie. To accomplish this, D-Box creates a special "motion simulator" track whenever a new movie comes out on DVD, and releases it on the Internet. You download the track, load it in the audio processor, and perfect synchronization is established during DVD playback. As impressive as the seating arrangement was, I'm not exactly into riding an amusement park ride while watching a movie. As for the picture and sound, they were both top notch. The room was very big, and the system configuration was just right for it. Add a bunch of normal theatre seats and a popcorn machine, and you can sell tickets! That should help you pay off the high cost of the system...
The adjoining room had a bit of a surprise. Snell Acoustics was coming back to Canada after being absent from the marketplace for a few years, and they were showing off one of their new series of home theatre speakers. The projector itself was a new InFocus Screenplay LS110 model incorporating a 1024x768 resolution DMD chip and Faroudja's video processing technology. The only complaints I had about the room was first of all way too much stray light, and the puny projector was trying very hard to project an image on a screen ten feet wide! It was a bit too much for the projector. Despite the sizing problems, the image was still viewable which indicated what this new projector could do on a pinch. And the speaker set-up powered by an EDA 7250 processor and amplifier package more than made up for the dim image. The demo material consisted mostly of scenes from "The Phantom Menace" and "Pearl Harbor". The projector is expected to retail for $9,500.
Onkyo filled a reasonably sized room with plenty of their offerings which included their TX-SR and Integra DTR 6.2 series of receivers along with Angstrom bookshelf speakers and Onkyo's own DLP projector, the Integra DLP. The first thing I noticed is that the projector is identical to the NEC LT150Z model with the only visible differences being the color of the outer shell and the sticker price of $12,000. That's about 2.5 times more expensive than the suspiciously identical NEC projector! A black & white segment from a Roy Orbison concert DVD was the demo material of choice for much of the weekend. The sound was satisfactory, but the Onkyo projector's image was way too blue. Unless the color temperature of your display device is adjusted properly, don't ever show black & white material on it!
The Dumoulin chain of audio/video outlets filled their room with plenty of offerings from different manufacturers, giving their room the look of a mini retail outlet. Over to one side of the room, there was a curtained-off mini theatre with a Plus DLP projector (DMD chip information not available) and Energy speakers. The sound was acceptable, but he screen size was way too small to prove anything except that this machine could easily project an image the size of a mid-priced RPTV. The projector could have handled a much bigger screen.
One room which was used for a couple of the conferences was equipped with Naim Audio components, Euphonie speakers and what looked like a Sony VPL-VW10HT projector. The image wasn't sized properly, but the sound was at best okay. Without a properly sized image, it becomes difficult to appreciate the quality of the sound in the room. The two really go together.
The Sheraton DLP
Multi Électronique, the only legitimate home theatre presentation at the Sheraton, equipped their room with a Yamaha DXP1 DLP projector, plenty of JM Lab 246 series of speaker components, and the NAD Silver series of processors and amplifiers. The projector may have been equipped with only a single 1024x768 DMD chip, but it didn't perform like one! With a price tag of $16,000, this was the only projector whose color temperature appeared to be reasonably accurate based on the black & white image from the same Roy Orbison DVD title that was shown in the Onkyo room. The DA-Lite screen of unknown model did a great job of displaying a beautiful image coming from the projector. Other demo material included "The Phantom Menace" (again) and "Jurassic Park III". which really showed the abilities of this projector on a reasonably sized screen about ten feet wide. And the sound quality was at par with the performance of the D-Box system at the Holiday Inn, but without the annoying motion simulator.
The Good
One candidate for the best home theatre room of the show would have to go to D-Box and their impressive demonstration of their equipment at the Holiday Inn. However, because of the high cost of the equipment and the questionable value of the motion simulator, this room only gets second place.
Overall, the best and most consistent room of the show had to be the Multi Électronique room at the Sheraton. The system was less expensive than the other pricier rooms, yet it delivered excellent picture and sound quality for the money. It would have been better if the projector was equipped with a 16x9 chip instead of a 4x3 chip, but the fact the color temperature of the projected image was close to ISF specifications more than made up for this shortcoming.
The best budget room had to be Solution Projecteurs' NEC equipped room at the Delta. The unidentified sound system may have been there for show, but it was the type of sound system most of us serious but financially strapped home theatre nuts probably already own. With the addition of a NEC LT150Z projector, you can turn your modest set-up into a home theatre room that most people could only dream of having just a couple of years ago. Yes, there are some items that need to be addressed such as how to properly adjust the color temperature of the projector, but these questions should be answered in due time.
The Bad
An excellent candidate in the worst room category would have to go to Bose. I didn't appreciate the organized presentation of their Bose Lifestyle system one bit. If you've never seen this presentation, during the musical portion of the demo, the staff removes the big speaker assemblies and reveal that you've been listening to their tiny cube speakers all along. From my point of view, the ultimate goal of the presentation was to imply that those ridiculously small speakers actually sounded better than originally perceived by the average listener. What I heard in that room was a maxed out system that sounded just plain horrible both before and after the big unveiling. My Onkyo receiver, PSB Alpha bookshelf speakers and Paradigm subwoofer sound so much better than the Bose stuff, and I didn't pay a fortune to get it!
Despite this poor presentation, at least Bose didn't choose a room that was totally out of proportion with what they were trying to sell. Filtronique - Son Or, a local Montreal retailer, somehow believed that bigger was better. But renting one of the Delta Hotel's oversized master ballrooms? Unless you plan to subdivide the room into smaller demo cubicles as Sony did with the adjoining ballroom, you should never try to use one of these caverns to show off what turns out to be a single system. I have no doubt the demonstrated system would sound real great in my home, but it simply couldn't handle this huge room! Even worse, the music selection consisted of even more mediocre concert DVDs. The presentation was bad enough that I didn't even bother marking down the exact equipment set-up. I really wanted to leave the room.
The... Where are they?
Two companies were not present at the show, and I question the reasons for this. The first is the retailer The Audio Centre which this year decided to show off their products at the Montreal Home Show held just a few weeks ago. Unlike the three day HI-FI Expo, the Home Show ran for ten days! They also demonstrated their version of a motion simulator at the home show which didn't impress me any more than D-Box's concept at the HI-FI Expo. Basically, you don't want to snack on anything too heavy while riding one of these possessed couches.
The second company not at the show was Sharp, and this one puzzled me quite a bit. They have a new DLP projector, the SharpVision XV-Z9000U, which features an HDTV compliant HD-1 DMD chip, a six segment color wheel and it's custom designed image processor. This projector which sells for around $15,000 could have been the home theatre show-stopper of the entire weekend. It's closest rivals would have been the Yamaha and Runco projectors, both costing much more yet offering very few extra features. If you were at all interested in widescreen movies and HDTV, without a doubt this would have been the projector to buy. But since Sharp wasn't at the show, there was no way to confirm this.
Two companies which were at the show albeit only by convenience were Stewart Filmscreen and DA-Lite. Many rooms used various models of these manufacturers' screens. Unfortunately, the model of just about every screen found at the show was totally unknown. The two models that would have stood out in any room were conspicuous by their absence: the Stewart Greyhawk and Firehawk screens. Where were they? Many of the rooms equipped with smaller screen sizes could have easily benefited from this technology. Unfortunately, not a single room was equipped with either of these new screen designs so there really was absolutely no way to determine just how good these new screen materials could perform in your home. Talk about a missed opportunity.
So how was the show?
Despite the problems in obtaining accurate equipment specifications (I had to consult a few manufacturers' Web sites to get more detailed info), this year's home theatre rooms were much better prepared than the mess I saw just a couple of years ago. Yes, there are still a few faults in the presentation, but they are being worked on each and every year. Even the controlled presentation which were highly annoying in the past years ("fascist demos" as I call them) were much more accommodating to people just wanting to pass by for a glance. With three hotels to visit at this year's show, sometimes a glance is all the time you have.
We should be seeing a reduction in the price of DLP projectors over the next few months. As the technology improves and more people buy them, prices are bound to come down a bit. Right now, the cheapest model available at the show was the NEC LT150Z at $5,200 which is still a bit expensive for many of us. But even if the price of projectors dropped below $2,000, we'd better hope the prices of their projection lamps also drops. With prices ranging from $500 to $1,000 for a 1,000 hour rated lamp depending on the manufacturer, DLP projectors still have excessively high operating costs when compared with every other display technology available out there. But just like every other component in the home theatre market, even these "bright" items should drop in price. So start saving up for your new front projection system today! In a few months, you'll actually be able to buy one at a reasonable price and with reasonable operating costs.
Home theatre is definitely getting better and more affordable every year!