Don't Sell Your Old iPhone -- Use It To Create A Music System!

I recently succumbed to the marketing and got an iPhone 4S, despite the fact that my iPhone 3G still works fine. I considered selling the 3G on Ebay, but instead I used it to create a very cool stand-alone music system in the "no television allowed" living room of our Santa Fe home. I put the iPhone in a little $30 docking station and connected it to a ZVOX 580 surround sound speaker system. The result is fantastic!  I've got hundreds of songs on the iPhone, plus it uses my wifi network to access Pandora. The iPod dock's remote control let's me skip around without getting out of my chair. And the thing sounds incredible. And because the 580 sound bar has such a low profile, most people don't even notice the system -- event though it has five speakers and two powered subwoofers.

Some recycling projects are more fun than others.

Bing Goes Digital

My brother lives in Japan and gets especially homesick and nostalgic around the holidays. He recently posted a link to my Facebook wall of Bing Crosby singing “Christmas in Kilarney”, which conjured up memories of listening to our parents’ Bing Crosby Christmas album around this time of year. Which, in turn, conjured up memories of albums…

I eventually bought the same compilation on CD for myself, but even that is about 10 years old and the cover is all cracked and falling off. A couple years ago I put all my Christmas CDs into iTunes and created a “XMAS” playlist that I put on my iPod for the holidays. My how the times have changed.

It’s interesting to think about how much technology has changed in the 25-ish years since we sat around listening to Bing on our old red and white Realistic record player. But, no matter how they make it to our ears, the songs are still the same and filled with great memories of Christmases past. I wonder what Christmas song memories my kids will have, how they will be listening, and how “archaic” the iPod might seem to them in 20 years.

Happy Holidays!

Kate, ZVOX

The Anti-Cable TV Rebellion

There's a rebellion going on. After years of talking about it, people are giving up on TV -- or at least "TV in the conventional sense." It seems like every week or two I run across another person who has cancelled their cable or satellite TV service because the monthly rates are brutally high. Most of these people have simply switched to the internet.

- They get their news online as MSN.com, nytimes.com, bloomberg.com and hundreds of other sources.

- They get their movies -- and a lot more -- from a Netflix streaming account for under ten bucks a month.

- They get their TV shows from Huluplus for under ten bucks a month.

- They find clever ways to watch sporting events on line.

- And they can do most, if not all, of this from their living room TVs with a Roku streamer or an Apple TV.

My wife and I just spent two months away from our primary home, with just a 27" monitor/TV, a Roku streaming box and a ZVOX 555 sound bar home theater. We did not miss conventional TV even a little bit. In fact, not having local newscasters trying to frighten us every night was very peaceful.

This is a trend with some staying power....cable companies don't seem to be showing any signs of reducing their rates in a meaningful way.   The result of course is less advertising revenue to local TV stations.  Just like what started happening to local newspapers ten years ago.

HuluPlus, HBO Go and ITunes Accessibility Make Roku Streamer A Winner. Oh Yeah, And It's A Bargain.

We're big fans of the Apple®TV media streaming box. It's sleek. The interface is slick. And it gives us access to the iTunes library that resides on our big computer upstairs. So anywhere we connect the Apple box to a TV/ZVOX sound bar combination, we get a instant home theater and music media jukebox.

We also like our Roku streaming box. And lately, we like it even more than the Apple TV.

 The Roku interface isn't a slick as the Apple TV's, but it's pretty good.  The biggest shortcoming of the Roku system, until recently, was that it didn't give us access to our iTunes® library. But last summer they added a feature called MP3Tunes which lets us do just that. Plus the Roku give us access to HuluPlus -- which allows us to watch a whole big mess of TV shows for $7.99 a month -- much cheaper than buying shows through iTunes on the Apple TV.  The combination of a Netflix subscription and a HuluPlus subscription is cheap money compared to the cost of cable TV. And if you compare the cost of renting a cable box to the cost of buying a Roku box, pretty soon you'll be replacing cable boxes on your second and third TVs.

Another cool thing is traveling with a Roku player, especially for long term vacations. Just throw the little box in the suitcase and you bring entertainment wherever you go -- just plug in the HDMI connector.  And now Roku has added HBO Go -- a service that allows HBO subscribers to watch HBO on demand, at no extra cost, wherever they travel with their Roku box! And the new model is less than 50 bucks (compared to Apples' $100).

Apple TV, we like your sleek design and interface. But until you add HuluPlus and HBO Go, we're gonna dance with Roku.

® Apple and iTunes are registered trademarks of Apple, Inc.  Roku is a registered trademark of Roku, Inc.

Commercials Too Loud? How To Fix That.

Why is it that the most annoying commercials are also the loudest?

And why are they SO loud?

Yes, we know that there is legislation in the works to force broadcasters and cable providers to "turn down" all those loud commercials. But we'll believe it when we hear it.

In the mean time, the cool Output Leveling (OL) feature in our new ZVOX 555 and 580 sound bars pretty much takes care of the problem. It automatically recognizes that a commercial is too loud and turns it down so fast your ear can't tell what happened. It's also good for minimizing the sudden volume jumps so popular with many modern movies -- you know, when all of a sudden the music and surround sound effects get three times as loud as they need to be, just to get you "more involved" in the movie?

Output Leveling also deals with another issue -- Blu Ray DVD players that don't play loud enough.  Many of these new disc players seem to sacrifice overall volume level to improve dynamic range (the ability to go from soft sounds to loud sounds without distorting). The result is they just don't play very loud -- and our Output Leveling feature fixes that too, by pumping up the too-soft volume levels.

So if you don't like loud commercials, you can wait for our glorious legislators to force broadcasters what they should have been doing all along. Or you can buy a new ZVOX home theater system!

Dialog Emphasis -- Greatest Feature Ever On A TV Sound System?

When we introduced our first single-cabinet surround sound system in 2004, we were surprised by how many customers bought it for one simple purpose: they wanted to hear the spoken voice on TV shows. They didn't care about surround sound effects, great bass or musical fidelity. They just wanted to be able to understand the news announcer -- or the actor on the sitcom or cop show.
So when we were designing our new ZVOX 555 and 580 sound bar systems we put a special focus on voice reproduction -- introducing a revolutionary "Dialog Emphasis" control. This "DE" setting is makes voices more clear and easy to understand than any other audio system we have ever heard. A 555 or 580 with the DE control on makes voices just "jump out at you."
DE works much the way a hearing aid works. It de-emphasizes non-vocal sounds, and emphasizes the frequency range where voices occur. The feature also makes the voices uniformly loud, without a lot of variation in volume from one person to another.
The folks in our Massachusetts call center (all trained ZVOX employees by the way, no script-reading mercenaries), tell me that DE is hugely popular. Sometimes it seems like it's all anybody wants to talk about. This is a feature people really, truly like.
We've been making a big deal about vocal clarity for years, because TV speakers keep getting worse and worse. So it's interesting to note that some TV manufacturers are now paying some attention to the issue. The latest TV we got has a "Clear Voice" audio setting that actually helps a little. But there's only so much you can do with little tiny speakers that are aimed at the floor (yes, they are pointed straight down -- heaven forbid that consumers be forced to look at a speaker grille!). The first step towards clear voice reproduction is a using high quality speakers and amplifiers. Step two -- like the electronic magic we work with our DE feature -- only works right when applied to good speakers.
If you've ever had trouble hearing dialog on a TV show, you should try one of our new home theater systems. DE is kind of like cell phones. Before you have it, you think it's an unnecessary and maybe just-plain-stupid luxury feature. But once you've lived with it for a week, it becomes a necessity.

Ed Villchur

I had the honor of sitting at the feet of Ed Villchur during his most creative years. Roy Allison, his Executive with the title of Plant Manager assigned me to work with EV, as we called him, in developing the AR-4. I had discovered him in articles and in the letters to the editor of the hifi magazines of the 50's and a book written by him about hifi.

I worked next to the anechoic chamber on the fourth floor of the Thorndike St. building. The walls were covered with the rubber stamp of Henry Kloss, who had worked in developing the original AR woofer before going off to found KLH. My work consisted of building new prototypes, testing them in the anechoic chamber and occasionally bringing the promising one to EV's office for auditioning.

Edgar Villchur Helped Re-Define High Fidelity

His technical innovations and inventions were substantial. Even more impressive were his marketing innovations. When he started Acoustic Research, Inc. (AR), high fidelity was a home hobby affair, monophonic, of course. Hifi systems required many thoughtful purchases from many different sources. The typical hifi'er was usually an engineer who designed or built some of the components himself. The original Radio Shack store was in downtown Boston and the source of many components. The LP vinyl record was a recent development. Graduate students at MIT were working on pulsed amplifiers and four by four arrays of mid-range drivers (so-called "sweet sixteen", which were in a way the predecessor of the Bose 901.)

Marketing has always been a magical mystery to me, so I have no idea how he did it, but ten years later he had created a network of more than 3,000 distributors and dealers and a near monopoly on the hifi speaker market.

Having achieved his product and financial goals, he sold his company to a conglomerate, and more or less retired to his rustic home in Woodstock, NY.

Some of his inventions and innovations:

• Acoustic suspension woofer system, which allowed true bass from a small enclosure.
• The philosophy of accurate sound reproduction from a speaker, along with the requisite specifications. especially linearity and dispersion.
• He was a pioneer in the technique of audio delay by a tape loop.
• Dedicated public listening rooms (in Grand Central Station and Harvard Square.)
• Live versus record public concerts, where musicians alternated with recordings of their performance.
• Simulated "live vs recorded" as a R&D technique for subjective evaluation of new speaker designs.
• Not only anechoic loudspeaker measurement but also reverberant in a twenty sided polyhedron of his own design of which no two sides were parallel or perpendicular to each other.
• The development of an audiophile turntable for the mass market.

In marketing, his emphasis on quality and service were decades ahead.

When I started my own speaker company, virtually everything from product considerations to business practices were based on having worked with him. Unfortunately, I never learned anything about marketing.

Winslow Burhoe
AR,  KLH, EPI, Burhoe Acoustics, Audio Products International, Genesis Physics, Direct Acoustics and ZVOX Audio, a long trail...