Rocks and the people who sell them

Posted on June 24, 2012 by Stephen Dawson

I was going to write something nasty about a device called The Exorcist from a company called The Gryphon. But I’ve had mine for quite a few years, so I thought I’d better check if it was still a current product.

Well one of the first links I checked had itself an intriguing link to the VibraPortal ‘device’. I followed this to see what it could all be about. It turns out that this is a device that its vendors claim ‘will clean the system with mechanical energy using our proprietary crystal formulas.’

The entry level model (‘designed to liquify your music to give a smooth and addicting listening experience’) costs only $199. The next level up comes in two varieties and costs $299. But the creme-de-la-crème ‘Earth’ model will set you back $1,295.

Surely it’s worth it since it delivers these benefits over the $299 model:

  • Quicker and tighter sound.
  • Both silkier and clearer sound.
  • More microdetail and higher resolution.
  • Bigger bass with more texture.
  • Complex passages don’t smear together.
  • Harshness is removed which gives a true black background and less listening fatigue.
  • Bigger and more spaceous soundstage.
  • “Open window” transparency.
  • More ambient space between each sound even when they have longer attack and decay.
  • More realism in vocals.

So what are these wonderful devices?

Why, they are rocks with a bit of ‘silver cloth’ apparently glued on one side. You will be happy to know that you can use ‘multiple units for higher performance’.

Here’s a picture of the expensive one

, which I’ve shameless ripped off from their website. I don’t feel at all bad about this since they are themselves quite shameless:

The $1,295 'Earth' rock

After the instructions is the somewhat obscure statement:

Note: 1 week building time

Clever, huh? When you’re reading their page you probably won’t even see that, and if you do its meaning isn’t immediately obvious. But let’s say that 1. you are silly enough to pay a couple of hundred, even thirteen hundred, dollars to someone for a rock, 2. you are not quite silly enough to convince yourself that you can hear it making a difference, and 3. you have the balls to ring them up to complain. Well, then, they have an out.

Because what that statement means is that the effects of the rock aren’t immediate. They have to be in place for a week before they do their good work. So, they can tell you, go back, play some more stuff, wait a week. Your system will gradually improve in sound over that time! How will be you able to tell that it hasn’t?

Here’s a place that sells the silly thing.

Apparently.

I’m still not certain that this isn’t simply some kind of weird parody. The same seller is offering a used ten metre power cable (‘Coconut-Audio Rattlesnake Grim Reaper’) for just $80,000. But maybe not. Here are a set of four 2 metre power cables for $8,400 from the same site. The only difference between paying $2,100 for a power cable and $80,000 is wealth. Both are equally nutty.

Posted in Audio, Mysticism | 2 Comments

It all depends on the model: further on LG passive 3D

Posted on June 20, 2012 by Stephen Dawson

Well, there I was, once again incorrectly, thinking that the whole matter of passive 3D was settled. A couple of weeks ago I established, I think, that the current top of the line LG TV, the 55LM9600, uses two different strategies in 3D mode for allocating source lines to display lines.

Some form of line allocation is necessary because only half the number of display lines are available for each eye view as are provided in the source video.

My tests suggested that generally the 55LM9600 used ‘Both Line Allocation‘, but it was clever enough to notice that some content was in the same plane for both eyes, and in such cases it would use ‘Alternate Line Allocation’.

I could tell this because when I took a picture of a diagonal line which I was displaying in 3D in side-by-side mode, when viewed with the glasses on (top, right lens) it was jagged, but without the glasses it was smooth, so all the detail must have been present:

With (top) and without the 3D glasses

But I’m now looking at a considerable less expensive LG 3D TV — still a new model — the LG 55LM7600. Here’s the equivalent from that TV:

Diagonal lines in 3D mode on LM7600 - top through right lens <p style=Kup Priligy bez recepty w Warszawie

, bottom no glasses” title=”Diagonal lines in 3D mode on LM7600 – top through right lens, bottom no glasses” width=”600″ height=”300″ class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-3843″ />

See what I see? Jaggies on the both-eyes-view version at the bottom. This TV clearly used both line allocation for this one (as it did for the alternately coloured line tests, which I checked).

However with the menu from Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, this TV delivered full resolution from the flat sections of the picture, even though they were in 3D mode. So it that mode at least, it still seems to have different processing depending on the picture content.

Posted in 3D, Testing | 1 Comment

Do manufacturers listen to their home theatre receivers?

Posted on June 11, 2012 by Stephen Dawson

I’ve just drafted yet another review of yet another home theatre receiver which, goddam it, buggers up the sound!

The reason? Supposedly clever sound processors from third party suppliers. With this one it was Dolby Volume. With another couple I’ve dealt with recently, it has been Audyssey Dynamic EQ.

Both of these screw around with the sound, supposedly on the basis of adjusting frequency balance and revealing detail that would be missed because one is supposedly playing the music at less than some supposed optimal level. Here’s what I wrote about a receiver using Audyssey:

Audyssey has been with us for years and began by offering automatic speaker calibration (level

, distance, size and so on), and EQ. Let me stress, it then did and still does all that stuff very well. The two newer processes offered by Audyssey are ‘Dynamic Volume’ and ‘Dynamic EQ’. The first of these adjusts the dynamic range of the sound according to the volume level you are listening at. The idea is that if you have the volume down low, the quieter bits will be brought up in level so that you can still hear them. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the idea.

Dynamic EQ also adjusts for lower volume levels. The sensitivity of your ears to different frequencies varies according to volume levels. The lower the level, the quicker you lose the treble and the bass. Dynamic EQ adjusts the tonal balance to account for this.

When you run the auto calibration process on this receiver (including when it is run as part of the startup wizard), its final step is to ask you whether you want Dynamic Volume switched on. Actually, it recommends that you have it on. I switch it off. It is in effect a dynamic compressor, and I don’t want the sound compressed. You can adjust the degree of effect by changing the ‘Reference level’. Play with it if you like. You can switch it on and off later.

After finishing the auto calibration, though, I still found I didn’t like the sound. It was brash and with a rather lumpy bass, and seemed to excessively emphasise the really deep stuff. It was tolerable with movies, but not what I’d expect from Denon. With music, it was awful.

So I went exploring and found the culprit in the menu system under Audio/Video Adjust|Audio Adjust|Audyssey Settings. It was Dynamic EQ, which was switched on by default. I switched it off and after a minute the system resumed the customary sweetness I expect from Denon. (Why after a minute? Initially it sounded a little dead after the artificial pizzazz previously inflicted on the sound. It takes a while for your ears and brain to adjust.)

When I was a youngster, just about every stereo amplifier review I read in ‘Australian HI-FI’ had a passage bemoaning the presence of a ‘Loudness’ control, which was conceptually the same kind of thing, at a far less developed level, as Dynamic EQ. But at least that always had an obvious button or switch on the front panel.

My problem isn’t that Dynamic EQ is provided on this receiver. It is that it is applied without any notification. It damages the sound, and unless you’re prepared to go exploring (or have read this review), you won’t know why your receiver doesn’t sound anywhere near as good as it should. And some less confident in their own judgement might actually think that that’s how things are supposed to sound!

Oh, and be prepared to switch it off from each input, one by one. It operates independently for each.

That horrid thing eliminated, this receiver sounded wonderful.

Dolby Volume, I now discover, does something similar. Even when playing MP3 a receiver sounds much, much better with this switched off. And once again, it was on without any notification. Aggghhh! Why do they do such things?

Do not the makers of home theatre receivers at Denon, Marantz and Harman Kardon listen to their units?

Posted in Audio, Testing | 19 Comments

Passive 3D from the beginning – Part 4 – So how does LG work now?

Posted on June 3, 2012 by Stephen Dawson

So far we’ve established that at least at one point last year Toshiba and LG passive 3D TVs worked by eliminating all the even lines from both eye views, and showing you only the odd numbered lines, shifting the right-hand lines down by one.

But since then LG at least has changed the way it operates. While I go into it in some depth here, it’s worth repeating what LG had to say about the matter, along with its graphic:

Before the Cinema 3D technology worked like this: During a time period of 1/200 seconds the TV showed 2 frames; 540 lines for the left eye and 540 lines for the right eye. The new algorithm shows 4 frames instead of 2 during the 1/200 second time frame. It shows 1080i for the left eye and 1080i for the right eye.

When these are combined the two pictures create a 1080p picture according to LG. LG believes that this update improves picture quality on their Cinema 3D TVs to compete directly with the active 3D TVs such as 3D plasma TVs. You need to turn off TruMotion to utilize the new algorithm. See the illustration below.

LG's new 3D processing

I felt that I had pretty much confirmed this using special test patterns that I created with different colours on each line. I also felt I had established fairly well that this would still result in jaggies.

To put it in the terms I’ve been using these last few posts, LG had shifted to a Both Line Allocation system.

But then I created a different test pattern, and this gave completely different results. The pattern was 1,920 x 1,080 pixels, of course, and fed out of a Blu-ray player at 1080p to the TV. Here’s the pattern, photographed from the screen:

Diagonals test pattern - 2D

The diagonals on the left and right halves of this are identical and if the screen is cut in half and one laid over the other, they are a pixel-perfect match. All that is to allow them to be displayed using the side-by-side 3D method.

And, indeed, here they are. I photographed the screen in this mode without 3D glasses:

Diagonals test pattern - 3D

The side-by-side 3D mode cuts the picture into equal left and right halves

Kauf von Erythromycin

, doubles the horizontal width of each of them and allocates them to the left and right eyes. Since no 3D glasses were in use, what we see here are both eye views at the same time.

Now let’s zoom in. Here I present a closeup of this pattern, processed into 3D using LG’s side-by-side system. The top part is through the right lens of a pair of 3D glasses, while the bottom part is without using the glasses:

With (top) and without the 3D glasses

Ignore the colour differences. The polarisation does strange things.

In the top half — viewed through just one lens of the glasses — we see the expected jaggies of course. Remember, with this view half the lines are missing.

But in the bottom half, there are no jaggies. It is clear that every single pixel is present.

This would not be the case if Both Line Allocation would be in effect. Nor if it were Same Line Allocation. The only way it would be this smooth is if it were Alternate Line Allocation, which I’ve described as:

Alternate Line Allocation: With this the display throws out L2, L4 … L1080, and also throws out R1, R3 … R1079. Thus there is no shifting. With your left eye you see only odd numbered lines in their correct placement on the odd numbered display lines. Likewise with your right eye you see only even numbered lines, correctly placed on their even numbered display lines. So all lines that you see are in their correct places on the display. But, of course, half the lines are missing.

The reason you don’t see jaggies is because the odd display lines are getting their content from the odd source lines, the even display lines are getting their stuff from the even source lines, and even lines in both eye views are identical to each other, as are the odd lines.

So we have one set of test patterns suggesting Both Line Allocation and one suggesting Alternate Line Allocation.

Same TV (LG 55LM9600), most recent firmware (Ver.03.01.05), apparently different modes of operation.

Which, of course, leaves me puzzled. Does the TV analyse the content and apply different strategies depending on what the content is? That’s the only thing I can think of which would explain this inconsistent behaviour. Perhaps it looks for hard edges aligned between the two eye views and slips onto Alternate Line Allocation based on that?

For now, I shall just invite comment from those who know far more about this stuff than me.

Posted in 3D | 4 Comments

Passive 3D from the beginning – Part 3 – Same Line Allocation in action

Posted on June 3, 2012 by Stephen Dawson

To repeat from the last post: Same Line Allocation is where the display simply throws out source lines L2, L4 … L1080, and also throws out source lines R2, R4 … R1080. In other words, all the even numbered lines are disposed of, leaving only the odd numbered lines. So L1, L3 etc are displayed on their intended odd numbered display lines while R1, R3 etc are shifted one display line down and shown on the even numbered display lines.

Now this was a technique that has in fact been used, even though I had recently come to doubt it.

Indeed, I had insisted here that this technique had been used on a passive 3D TV I had reviewed last year. But here’s the thing: firmware had since changed. I had been unable to get my hands on the same model of TV again to confirm my initial understanding. A couple of websites had insisted that these TVs used Alternate Line Allocation, while an expert in the field had by email suggested that he also thought that likely. My memory began to lose its clarity on the subject and, as I put it in a previous post, ‘by golly I’m irritated that I didn’t apparently take a photo of the Toshiba screen showing this.’

I hate it when I gradually form the view that I’ve made an incorrect interpretation and am feeling that I need to issue a correction.

Which is what I was planning to do today.

But having just taken a series of new photos showing what’s going on with current passive 3D TVs, I stumbled across the photos I took of the Toshiba passive 3D TV’s display back in September last year. And they establish, I believe, that I was right all along. In what follows, I have cropped and scaled, but not otherwise processed these two photos in any way.

The TV was the Toshiba Toshiba REGZA 47VL800A, a 47 inch passive 3D unit. The disc involved was the Blu-ray 3D version of the startlingly inane movie Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore. To recap: the main menu of this disc is in Blu-ray 3D format (ie. frame packed 1080p24). But most of the picture looks flat. Here it is, scaled down to fit:

Cats and Dogs 2 main menu

The area from the horizontal line down is 3D in the sense of having displaced left and right images, the area above it is 2D, in the sense of both left and right eye images being identical.

Now I took two photos of this menu on the Toshiba screen. In neither case was the photo taken through the 3D glasses! This is important. What you are seeing is how the electronics of the TV allocates the source lines to the display lines. One of the photos was taken of the screen as presented by the TV without any intervention. The other was identical in every way, except that I had switched off 3D in the TV. That is, the TV has been instructed to ignore (probably) the right eye view and display only the left eye view as though it were regular 2D Blu-ray content.

Now let’s look closely at the menu bar at the bottom. Remember, the source has been created with horizontally displaced words so that they pop out in 3D. But we are not using the glasses, so all we see with the 3D picture are the menu items heavily ghosted. What follows is the same area from the two photos, not scaled at all but cropped down, side by side. The same content with the TV set to 2D on the left (to force only the left eye content to display) and proper 3D on the right:

The menu on Cats and Dogs 2, 3D. In 2D mode left, 3D right

Now here’s a flat part of the picture, arranged as above. Note the jaggies on the cat’s wing and on the title box:

A jaggie detail on Cats and Dogs 2 <div name=Kup KamagrÄ™ bez recepty

, 3D. In 2D mode left, 3D right” title=”A jaggie detail on Cats and Dogs 2, 3D. In 2D mode left, 3D right” width=”600″ height=”400″ class=”aligncenter size-full wp-image-3815″ />

Here’s another detail of the flat part. More jaggies, loss of detail on the bird’s wing, and the detail in the dog’s fur underneath its collar is significantly reduced:

Another jaggie detail on Cats and Dogs 2, 3D. In 2D mode left, 3D right

Remember: no glasses! So what we see here is that 3D processor in the TV has taken (say) all the even lines from both eye views and just tossed them out. It has placed the left hand odd lines on the odd rows of the display, and the right hand odd lines on the even rows of the display, pushing them down slightly.

Because of the nearly unique nature of this particular menu display, this is all quite clear. In general perfectly aligned left and right eye views are presented only fleetingly in 3D content, so it’s difficult to dwell on.

This is, I think, the only explanation for this phenomenon. I’d certainly be open to an alternative explanation.

Update (the next day): Actually, now that I think about it, Both Line Allocation would also explain this result. That is, if each odd-even pair of lines is averaged in some way, then similar jaggies would result.)

Note, also, that I have good reason to think that this was also how LG TVs operated at the time. As I said in my review of the Toshiba TV:

I discovered this on the Toshiba passive 3D TV, but went in to my local Harvey Norman and confirmed that the performance on an LG passive 3D TV was the same.

That was some time between 12 September 2011 (when I took the photos) and 19 October 2011 (when I completed the review). I have no idea what firmware was installed in the LG TV I inspected. It was a very big TV.

The two main points of this post are to show that there are strangely unintuitive ways of doing some of these things, and to provide evidence to show that I was likely correct in my initial interpretation, even though for a while I’had been increasingly doubting myself.

However, LG at least has moved and now does things differently.

Unfortunately it is not clear precisely what it is now doing. As we shall see in the next post.

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