In This eNewsletter:
• Putting It Together by Thomas J. Norton
• Format Wars I: Pass the Ammunition by Shane Buettner
• DVDs of the Month by Thomas J. Norton

By Thomas J. Norton

You say you want to build your own speakers? You've checked out the catalogs I mentioned in our December 2005 Newsletter and think it might be fun, and a money-saver, too?

Fun, yes—if you're the type who enjoys cutting, pasting, trial, error, challenges, setbacks, and (you hope) eventual triumph over adversity. It's easy to throw together a speaker system that works. It's far more difficult to build a good one. And unless you're exceptionally lucky (think lottery-type odds), or have both an excellent ear and test gear (and know how to use both), you're not likely to come up with a world-beater.

Speaker design is a balancing act. Up until the early 1970s, it was largely guesswork and design-by-ear, occasionally complemented by an anechoic chamber beyond the reach of many small speaker manufacturers (not to mention the weekend loudspeaker warrior). Measurement tools were primitive. Computers with the necessary processing power took up an entire room apart from those aboard the Apollo spacecraft, and no one but your Uncle Sam could afford those. Very few speaker companies even considered using computer-aided design, and certainly no do-it-yourself nut did. But those speakers—commercial and amateur—all of them crudely-designed by today's standards, were the ones we loved during the most explosive and lucrative growth period in audio history. Companies like AR, KLH, Quad, Advent, Infinity, JBL, Rectilinear Research, and even Bose (with the controversial 901—the speaker that made the company) dominated the market and produced speakers that delighted legions of audiophiles.

But starting in those long-ago 70s a series of developments brought more science into what had been the largely subjective art of speaker design. A speaker system consists of drivers, a crossover, and as cabinet, all of which must be closely matched to perform properly. The hit-or-miss techniques that had served the early years of high fidelity design were finally put to rest when Thiele (not related to the speaker company Thiel) and Small established a mathematical relationship between the physical parameters of speaker drivers and enclosures. Until then speaker design had been perhaps 70 percent art and 30 percent science. Now the ratio reversed, and speaker design became a science for the first time—but a science that would continue to reflect the artistry of the designer in balancing the many compromises that existed then and still remain today.

Other researchers too numerous to mention improved the techniques of crossover design and cabinet construction. Drivers evolved from their simple paper cone origins to the complex, exotic materials used today (though treated paper still remains a viable choice favored by some designers for the midrange, and arguably as good as any exotic composite for woofers).

What we have today is a bewildering variety of driver designs, enclosure technologies, and design tools that both make it both more likely that the educated amateur can come up with a good speaker design, and more complex and expensive for him or her to do so. Good drivers can be moderately priced, but some will induce sticker shock. There is a range of sophisticated, computerized test tools available (mostly for PCs, with a few for Macs). While these are now relatively affordable, they aren't cheap. You can easily spend $2K-$3K to start—hardly a sensible investment if you plan to build a single, moderately priced home theater speaker system. But it may be worthwhile if you intend to turn the effort into a serious hobby, want to build speakers for family or friends, or intend to turn your interest in speaker design into a career.

You can still buy a woofer and a tweeter, combine them with a generic crossover and a box built in your garage using a few power tools, and with a little intelligent tweaking come up with a fairly listenable speaker. But if you plan to build anything serious, something that just might sound better than a $300 pair of speakers you can buy at retail, you need to do more than a little research, learn what you're doing, and perhaps invest in that test gear. For more information, check out some of the specialized speaker parts catalogs listed in that December newsletter. And do a little on-line surfing for sites related to DIY speaker building; you'll find a surprising number of them. In a few minutes of looking, I found several. Here are just a few:

• Audio writer and sometime speaker designer Lynn Olson takes a close look at the history of speaker design and delves into the pros and cons of various types of speakers and speaker drivers. It's useful and interesting information for any audiophile, not just the budding speaker builder.
• This link has a useful discussion on the basics of speakers and speaker building, including explanations of the important loudspeaker parameters you'll see in driver specifications.
• Veteran loudspeaker expert and researcher Siegfried Linkwitz has a lot to say here about speaker design, including some designs of his own that can be built by the amateur who knows which end of a soldering iron to grab.
• Speaker Builder was an excellent magazine on—you guessed it—speaker building. It ran from the 1970s until just a few years ago, when it was combined with a sister publication, Audio Amateur. The two were morphed into a single publication called AudioXpress. The latter isn't nearly as thorough as Speaker Builder was on loudspeakers (back issues and CD-ROMs of the latter are available), but it's still a good source of occasional speaker design articles and advertisements that cover products of interest to amateur builders, including test tools. It's carried on many newsstands, at least in larger cities.
• Voice Coil, put out by the same publishing company as AudioXpress, is more professionally oriented, pricier, and subscription only. But it's extremely useful if you're serious about the field.

And I can't overlook the seminal book on the subject that's reasonably accessible to the ambitious amateur: Loudspeaker Design Cookbook by Vance Dickason. Dickason has designed speakers for several companies, including much of the Atlantic Technology line. It's now in its seventh edition and has been printed in seven languages. Available from the AudioXpress website as well as other sources, it's the most complete discussion you'll find in print on the subject, and even includes several complete speaker designs you can build. Even if you have no intention of building your own speakers, it's a superb primer on the subject of speaker design that will make you a more intelligent consumer.

And who knows. Somewhere out there someone reading this and thinking, "I can do that," may just become the hottest new speaker designer of 2015.

By Shane Buettner

As I write this 2006 inaugural newsletter, I'm still shaking off the Las Vegas hangover of CES. This year's CES was about two things: on the hardware side, the steady increase in 1080p displays (even some prototype plasmas were shown), and on the software side, the launch of the HD DVD and Blu-ray formats became as official as they can until we actually get our hands on discs and players.

Leading into this year's CES was the big news that Hewlett-Packard had dumped its platform of exclusive support for Blu-ray and would also be supporting HD DVD as well. The rallying cry was that while Blu-ray group had adopted the Mandatory Managed Copy feature dear to Intel and Microsoft's heart, it had not moved on adopting HD DVD's iHD based interactivity layer, instead sticking with its Java-based solution. HP is interested in being chummy with Microsoft and Intel for obvious reasons, so for now they're playing both sides of the fence.

So, we were expecting to be treated to some specifics on hardware and software launch dates at CES, and indeed, the first day of the show saw HD DVD players announced from Toshiba and around 50 software titles announced by Warner, Paramount, and Universal. The initial players from Toshiba are the $500 HD-A1 and the $800 HD-XA1, and the first players and a handful of titles are schedule to ship in late March; the remaining titles are scheduled to ramp up to around 50 titles by June, and by the 2006 holiday shopping season there will allegedly be nearly 200 HD DVD titles available. Check UAV soon for a complete list of announced titles.

As with any launch, a number of the first titles are action flicks we've seen time and again- Twister and Lethal Weapon, Apollo 13, and that grand old submariner U-571. I enjoy seeing Harvey Keitel dodging depth charges as much as the next guy, but if we're choosing movies based on great demo clips, why not just offer a demo disc with clips instead of crowding the shelves with these golden moldies?

But there will also be some hot new titles released either day and date with standard DVD, or pretty darned close, including Harry Potter and Goblet of Fire, Syriana, Aeon Flux (OK, maybe that's not really hot, but it is new) and Jarhead. Punching things up further were announced titles that haven't even hit theaters yet, such as Mission: Impossible 3, Poseidon, and Superman Returns.

Blu-ray made good on its promise of broader hardware support, with Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, Samsung, Philips, and LG Electronics all showing players scheduled to be available in summer, which seems so far to mean approximately June. Although some manufacturers did not announce player pricing (including Sony, regarding their BDP-S1 player), the Pioneer Elite BDP-HD1 was announced at $1800, and Samsung's BD-P1000 was priced at $1k. Although Sony's Blu-ray capable PlayStation3 will only cost $300-$400, it's still clear at this point that Toshiba's HD DVD players are priced friendlier to the mass market. And speaking of PS3, there is still no firm date for the much-anticipated gaming console.

Blu-ray's software lineup was more impressive in scope than HD DVD's lineup as the Warner and Paramount titles announced are mostly coincident in both formats, and Blu-ray had the additional juice added by announcing titles from Columbia Pictures, MGM, Fox, Lion's Gate and Buena Vista (Disney). Those last five studios are exclusively supporting Blu-ray and give the Sony-backed format a big advantage in packaged media, which is being touted as being available this summer, and in some corners nailed down to June.

Some of the titles you'll see only on Blu-ray include Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Reservoir Dogs, Pirates of the Caribbean, Ladder 49, Ice Age, Lord of War, House of Flying Daggers, Bridge on the River Kwai, and a day and date with DVD release of the upcoming Underworld Evolution. And of course no format could be launched without the 110th re-release of Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Fifth Element making obligatory appearances.

As you've probably inferred from the above, if HD DVD makes its launch date it will have a head start of two to three months on Blu-ray, if Blu-ray in fact makes its early summer timetable a reality. Be sure to check out my CES report for more in-depth information regarding the next-gen format launches.

Interactivity: The Forgotten Son Of The Next-Gen Formats
1080P video, uncompressed multichannel audio, we already knew the new format capable of these feats of picture and sound. One of the coolest things about CES 2006 for me was getting a peak at what the "enhanced interactivity" features of the new formats will actually mean to us consumers. While Blu-ray talked up interactivity and how cool it will be, the HD DVD folks actually demonstrated some of the new features.

Using and HD DVD disc of The Bourne Supremacy, Microsoft showed how chapter searches will work in the new formats. On the current DVD platform performing a chapter search means exiting the movie entirely and bouncing out to an annoying animated set of new screens, and often having to shuffle through sets of scenes. With HD DVD, the movie keeps playing in full motion while the chapters superimpose over the video at the bottom of the screen. Bounce to the scene you want and bam! You're there without leaving the movie and being assaulted by an overzealous graphic designer.

While DVD's commentary tracks are voice-overs, the HD DVD of The Bourne Supremacy had several talking-head style filmed commentaries to choose from. After choosing whose commentary stream you want to hear and see, you can then choose whether the talking head is a translucent one in the corner of the screen, like a TV network logo, or the main video can fade into the background and the commentary video becomes the main image on screen.

Evolutionary more than revolutionary, this is still a step-up and we're probably only seeing the tip of interactivity iceberg at this point.

HDTV Calibration Wizard Monster-ISF Series. $29.95

You have all the videophile-approved test DVDs—Digital Video Essentials, Video Essentials, AVIA, a variety of THX DVDs with their setup patterns, HQV Benchmark, and maybe even AVIA Pro and Digital Video Essentials Pro. You know the drill on setting up your video display—brightness, contrast, color, tint, sharpness, color temperature—backwards and forwards. You know you should turn off all those pesky special features like flesh tone, black enhancement, and most of the time even noise reduction should be defeated (though you should use those fixed and/or dynamic iris controls if your set has them).

But you have friends and family who break out in a cold sweat at the sight of a PLUGE or multiburst pattern, or turn green when the color bars come on. Monster Cable and the Imaging Science Foundation recognize that fact, and set out to produce a video set-up disc that almost anyone can understand and use.

The result is the HDTV Calibration Wizard DVD, hosted by singer/songwriter Jenna Drey. It may be a black mark against my pop culture smarts to admit that I've never heard of Jenna Drey, but that's probably because she only appeared on the pop music scene last year after gaining some attention as a songwriter. She has released no complete albums as yet. This DVD includes her first music video, "Why Should I Believe You." She supposedly has a three-octave vocal range, but if this song covers a tenth of that, I'd be surprised.

Based on the music video here the jury is still out on Jenna's singing and songwriting talents. But she is certainly easy to look at and does an intelligent, professional job guiding the viewer through the setup instructions.

The DVD contains video program material produced in a way appropriate for video display setup. There are no conventional test patterns (one or two do make an appearance but are incidental to the formal presentation). One screen includes a black "X" that should just fade into the background when the brightness (black level) control is properly adjusted. A brightly lit white shirt is used to set the contrast (white level) for maximum output without clipping.

There's a clever scene for adjusting the color intensity using three models made up with three different flesh-tone intensities—correct, slightly pale, and slightly too colorful. When the girl in the middle looks right and the others too pale or intense, respectively, your color is right.

A short test is included for audio-video synchronization (lip sync). Another sequence uses a game of pool (although the girls don't look like they're dressed for a casual evening at the pool table) to test for proper aspect ratio and overscan. And many of the scenes include patterns in the background that videophiles will recognize as more than casual set decoration. They even manage to sneak in a grayscale, though in the spirit of the disc it isn't explained.

What is well explained are the functions of the various controls on a video display. It quickly dispels, for example, the rampant consumer confusion over what brightness and contrast do (a situation compounded by misinformation in the owner's manual for virtually every consumer television and video projector I've seen).

Incidentally, Noel Lee, the "Head Monster," of Monster Cable provides a little of the narration and all of the slightly intrusive Monster Cable promotional chatter for a new series of ISF-approved cables that opens and closes the disc. But once the tests begin the sales pitches do not interrupt them.

I wouldn't go as far as Lee does in saying that the music video in this disc is an audio/video experience the likes of which I've never seen or heard before. But according to Joel Silver of the ISF, this disc is mastered in both conventional standard definition (which is how you will see it on most of today's video gear, regardless of the fact that it was "mastered" in high def), and in WMV HD (Windows Media 9 High Definition) at 720p. You can access the latter only by playing the disc back on a properly configured computer, which I could not do for this review.

There are three ways to get this disc. One is retail at $29.95 from most Monster Cable dealers. Another is attending a Circuit City or Best Buy training session as a member of the sales staff. And the last is by buying Monster ISF cables.

This DVD isn't a substitute for your collection of test discs with all those fun patterns on them. And it won't help you calibrate a grayscale without test tools (and even then you'll need patterns not included here). But it does provide a fast route to get the best out of any video display short of a professional calibration. And for most casual TV watchers, it is the first test DVD I know of that is educational, effective, and relatively painless to use.—TJN