Want to get warmer, richer sound out of your hard drive full of tunes? Let a digital-to-analog converter work its magic
Want to have that amped-up, universe-changing quality all the time? Without tricking your ears with a towel? All it takes is a nondescript little box designed to perform alchemy on digital music. It will turn the dull and lifeless into shining gold. I know this sounds like audiophile snake oil. Fair enough. I started as a skeptic, too. But after hearing these digital-to-analog converters—or DACs—work their magic, I became a convert.
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Chicago Planetarium Stars Again After Revamp (not 3D – ultra high rez projection, blacker blacks)
The new show at the Adler Planetarium on the downtown waterfront will be one of the most data-intensive ever produced, featuring digital images captured by spacecraft and space-based telescopes.
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A horrifying Samuel Beckett short story…in 3D? [motion capture, not S3D]
I am gazing at the virtual world of Unmakeablelove, a 3D interactive simulation based on Samuel Beckett’s short prose work The Lost Ones, in which a group of people are enclosed within a narrow cylindrical world, left to shuffle and search pointlessly within its confines.
In the artwork, this pitiable world is rear-projected onto the walls of a 5-metre-diameter enclosure inhabited by 30 bodies, half the size of humans. Each body represents a character in Beckett’s text: the Searchers who actively thrust through the space looking for an escape, the Sedentary who lethargically slouch, and the Defeated – “for whom all hope is gone”, saysSarah Kenderdine at City University of Hong Kong, who created the work with Jeffrey Shaw.
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Analyst: Consumers Prefer Movie Rentals to Purchase, Theatrical
Consumers continue to migrate toward less expensive options for home entertainment, including subscription video-on-demand (streaming), kiosks and by-mail, and away from sellthrough (physical and electronic) and movie theaters, according to a new report.
Michael Pachter, analyst with Los Angeles-based investment firm Wedbush Securities, issued the conclusions in a May 24 research note compiled from a sanctioned survey of 2,500 qualified U.S. consumers in April.
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PBS to Launch LearningMedia Digital Education Service
PBS on Wednesday announced plans to launch a new broadband education service called PBS LearningMedia in time for the 2011-12 school year.
The service, designed for students in pre-kindergarten through college, will include classroom-ready content from 1,500 public media producers and more than 350 local PBS stations.
“Digital media content — so pervasive in the lives of children — has the potential to dramatically change the way students learn and participate in a global society,” said Paula Kerger, the president and CEO of PBS.
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Watching the Watchers
Deb Roy stands before what is now a familiar image of a "social graph," representing the ways people are connected to each other through online social networks such as Twitter. But as he stands there, a more complicated graph appears. Roy calls it the "content graph." It represents how pieces of content are connected to each other on TV—for example, which commercial aired with which show, or how viewership of one episode compares with the audience for the next installment. Then he puts in the final piece. A thick network of connections grows between the people and the content. The human eye can't make out any of the complexities at this point; the image looks like an enormous cocoon. But by hunting for important signals in that mass of interconnected information, Roy hopes to find the future of television.
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Connected TVs Forecast to Exceed 123M Units in 2014
According to the DisplaySearch Q1’11 Quarterly TV Design and Features Report, the connected TV category is forecast to grow to over 123 million shipments in 2014 (at a 30% compound annual growth rate).
Emerging markets will also play a major role in this growth, with Eastern Europe forecast to grow from 2.5 million connected TVs shipped in 2010 to over 10 million in 2014. In addition, DisplaySearch findings indicate that 33% of flat panel TVs sold in China in 2013 will have internet capability.
Read the full press release with more information here.