So, what do you get, LCD or plasma?

Plasma is sharper, with better blacks.  But LCD is better in bright light.  Then again, there’s that new Panasonic plasma with the matte finish, that shows no glare.

How confusing!

Have you watched anything in HD?  Makes you feel like you’re at the movies.  With that rectangular aspect ratio.  You almost expect the ratings insert to come up before every show.  It’s a religious experience, you’ve got to have it.

Actually, Felice already has it, in her bedroom, a 36" LG.

Isn’t it fascinating how the brands have changed?  In the initial color era, the goal was to have a Zenith.  We had an Admiral, years before anybody else had color.  You see my dad won it in a raffle at the JCC!  It was a hundred dollar ticket.  He ponied up fifty, and two others put down twenty five bucks.  When they won, my father paid each of the others seventy five dollars and took the set.  Yup, that was a good deal back in the sixties, when color televisions verged on a grand.

People would come to our house and marvel at the set.  Oldsters would say the picture was not that good, not that sharp.  But every October my buddies would race to my house from school to watch the final innings of the World Series, when they still played baseball during the day, when young kids still cared about the game, when it wasn’t the addiction of aging baby boomers and truly old men.

Then, three or four years later, in ’65 or ’66, color came down in price to the point where many of my friends no longer came by for the game.  And then the Admiral burned out and we got a Zenith with a remote control.  And that television sufficed until my mother got a lousy Sharp from a friend in the eighties, and refused to replace it, believing that TV was a substandard medium.

Now television is the primary medium.  "Spider-Man 3" might have garnered $59 million its first day, but the reviews have been far from stellar, the word "mediocre" comes to mind.  It’s positively American.  Overhype, mass mentality, all calories and no protein.  All FILLER! Whereas when one sits down and watches "The Sopranos" in HD, one has a religious experience.  Right inside the frame is a whole world, not a concoction of lowest common denominator Hollywood pricks with contempt for their audience, but people who want to test the limits and do something great!  Not that they always succeed, but you applaud their efforts, you root for them, because we want the fruits of their labor, we want greatness.

That’s what the purveyors have wrong, that we want mediocrity.  The reason "American Idol" scores is it’s got more drama than the tripe on the big screen.  We can divine the essence, we’re just not exposed to it often enough.

And there’s an arms race on television.  Between not only Showtime and HBO, but FX and Bravo too.  Everybody’s looking for something that hooks the public.  And that’s why you’ve got to have the box.  To participate.  Watching TV on cell phones?  That’s a joke. It’s not about the information so much as the EXPERIENCE!  Draw the curtains, turn up the sound, blend with the screen.  Get taken away for an hour or two.  That’s what you’re working for, to be able to afford this experience!

And the price keeps coming down.

I love gear.  All the specs, all the philosophies.  It’s not about cutting corners in video, but giving you more cluck for your buck.  And the prices have gotten so cheap that the hoi polloi have ventured in.  They may be buying Vizios from Costco, but they don’t want to be left out.

And if you wander into Magnolia, or Ken Crane’s, or some other video emporium, you won’t want to be left out EITHER!

It’s the picture.  Sometimes the same one replicated over complete walls, one set after another.  And there’s always something better than you can afford, that you can aspire to, that you can dream about.  Sure, you might be looking at a 46" set, but imagine having a 70!  Wouldn’t that be great!

And you’ve got to get a sound system to go with your big screen.  Whether it be cheapie theatre-in-a-box for five hundred bucks, or real B&W sound.  Amplified by a receiver with enough acronyms to baffle anybody but a fifteen year old boy.  Do you need HDMI to go with your 1080p?  There’s a learning curve, and every detail counts, because you want to get it right.

It’s a religious experience.  Divining all the data.

Felice likes the look of LCD, and the room she wants to put the set in has glass doors.  But how big?  A 40" set NOT in HD format shows a picture only as big as her old Sony, presently in the living room.  So, you’ve got to go bigger.  At least 46".  50"?

And what brand?  Sony may be dying in music and portable music players, but it’s on a tear in TV.  It’s like the old days, perceived to be the best, and an extra chunk of change more.  But if you’re spending this much, should you pop for the XBR?

And what about Samsung?  Their set looked better than the XBR!  Could that be store adjustment?  Brighter sets looking more appealing?  Then again, they make the screens in the same factory.

Samsung…  Can you imagine buying a Samsung ANYTHING twenty years ago?  KOREAN?  Give me a break!  That’s one thing the oldsters don’t get anymore, there’s no loyalty to the old names.  Not even to Jay-Z.  There’s no legacy, what’s best TODAY!

And the Samsung looks pretty damn good.

So do you pop for the B&W ceiling speakers?  They’re blowing out some Klipsch set.  And Bose…  Funny how in the high end shops they pooh-pooh the direct-reflecting household name.

And I see all the shit they have in "Sound & Vision".  Definitive!

As for receivers…  Igor wouldn’t go with anything less than the $1,600 Yamaha.  You want your Blu-Ray player to render at 1080, right?

How did the music business fuck up so badly?  This used to be OUR domain!

Pristine sound…  You wanted to get closer to the music.  Oh, it was a hit out of the speaker in your dashboard, but at home you wanted to be bathed in the notes, you couldn’t really appreciate the music until you heard it on a component system.

But then the cassette became the standard.  Oh, you could buy a Nakamichi deck and record a tape every bit as good as vinyl, but the prerecorded stuff was duped onto crap, at high speed.  These tapes were not made for component stereos.

And then if the CD was perfection, what did it matter what you played it on?  In the nineties, a stereo became an all-in-one, for a couple of hundred bucks.

And then we got the iPod.

The iPod allows you to take your music everywhere.  But you don’t expect a replication of your home in a hotel (unless it’s frighteningly expensive!)  The iPod is about convenience.  What about EXCELLENCE!

Well, the music companies gave up on excellence.  So the gear makers moved on to TV.  Oh, this video revolution has been percolating for nearly two decades.  But it’s finally taken hold.  NOW IS THE TIME!

When is the time for sound?

Well, in order for it to work, the sound has to be good.  Have you listened to hit CDs?  Thank god we play them on iPods, they assault one’s ears.

All I know is today in Ken Crane’s I got that rush from the seventies, when I used to haunt Pacific Stereo, and University Stereo, and Federated.  Back when that was my number one aspiration, good sound.  I used to subscribe to three magazines, "Stereo Review", "Hi-Fidelity" and "Audio".  I used to love to stay home and play records.  That was an activity unto itself!

Now I get a better hit, one that I feel in my gut, watching the aforementioned "Sopranos".  The bigger the screen, the better.  With not only surround, but a center speaker and subwoofer.

Recorded music is a shitty experience.  But video is in a GOLDEN AGE!