Pioneer Kuro 60'' Review

Overview
The The PDP-6010FD Kuro is a 60 inch plasma TV by Pioneer. It features deep blacks (hence the name Kuro which apparently means black in Japanese), true 1080p, PC input and tons of HDMI inputs.

The Details
I used to have a 38 inch RCA CRT that weighed in at 216 lbs. Including the stand, that's more than me and the little lady put together. The picture was pretty awesome, so I never could justify buying a new TV even though 38 inches is entirely too small. My friend from Philly came out to visit and together, hand-in-hand, we went skipping through the malls, audio/visual stores, and big box outlets. We both have good eyes when it comes to TVs and we agreed on everything we saw. Samsung LCDs had the brightest and crispest screens, but the Pioneer Kuro was the one. It was nice and big and did a great job with the colors and high def signal.

I wasn't sure about the price ($6,500 retail, got it for $4,300), nor was I sure about it being a plasma. I've been hearing all these rumblings about how plasma is dead, long live LCD, and how most manufacturers are dumping plasma and sticking their chickens into the LCD basket. The benefits of LCD are that they're insanely bright and they don't suffer from burn-in. Plasmas are better with fast-moving images and heat up the room nicely so when you have an movie of a flickering fire in a fireplace, you actually feel like you're sitting in front of a real one. It also seemed like after about 42 inches, the LCDs looked crappy. 60 inches seems to be the right point. It's big enough (not really) to justify an upgrade, and the prices shoot up exponentially just AFTER 60 inches. The 70 Inch Sony Bravia XBR is, what, 33Gs ?

I had been researching the brand reputations as well, and Pioneer has a good one. So I bought it and hooked it up. I have my PS3 and Xbox 360 hooked up to the HDMI inputs, my PS2 hooked up to the component video, a laptop on the PC input and then all legacy stuff like Tivo switched through the receiver and then into the RCA inputs.

The Good
It does some magic with the colors, they become richer and more vibrant when displayed on this TV. Even on shitass sources like Tivo Series 1, it looks a little better than my last TV. I was watching some of my Tivo'd shows and was like, "why does he look so much older and fallapartier?". Turns out that the TV is doing a better job of showing people's wrinkles and bags and that's why they look like crap. I should mention that you have to be a few feet away for crappy signals to look good. Up close they look TERRIBLE, but that's because they're terrible signals to begin with.

HD Signals look AWESOMO, even up close. This includes Blu-Ray DVDs, Over-the-air High Definition signals, and the PC input. Speaking of Over-the-air signals, the TV does a GREAT job of picking up signals. With my old TV, I could only get the strongest signals, which was NBC and sometimes Fox and that was only after carefully rigging the antenna. With the Kuro, I don't ever have to change the position of the antenna, it's just magically able to pick up every station.

There are a ton of different display options, both in terms of screen dimensions and brightness. Kuro will remember each one for each input so you don't have to set them each time. I was worried about how dim it might be given that it is a plasma, but no problems there, it's nice and bright without being obnoxious. In fact, I had to turn down the brightness a little.

As far as the burn-in problem, it supposedly has a safety feature called the Orbiter which moves the pixels around. I can't say how effective this is, but I don't want to take any chances.

The little built-in speaker system does a pretty decent job with sound. Why am I using the built-in speakers instead of my receiver and Bose surround sound? See the next section.

The Bad
The TV does not forward the HDMI sound down to the receiver. Apparently, no TV does. This right here is some serious bullshit. In an ideal world, I could plug everything I had into the HDMI ports and then connect the audio-out on the TV down to the receiver. What is the point of having a standard (HDMI) that handles both sound and video if you have to hook up the audio to your receiver separately? I had to use the optical outputs of the PS3, PS2, Roku and Lacie and connect them to my receiver. I then promptly ran out of digital inputs on my receiver so the Xbox 360 had to use the TV's speakers. As I've mentioned before, this is bullshit. The only solution I can see is to buy an HDMI switching audio receiver.

Another gripe I have about the TV is the lack of analog inputs. I didn't have enough, so I ended up using the video switching of my receiver for the analog signals. This was annoying because it took me forever to figure out the best way to wire it up. My old TV allowed you to multiplex the inputs. That is, on input #2, there might be RCA *AND* S-video. If you plugged one device into the s-video and a different device into the RCA, the TV would pick whichever device was turned on and display that signal. As long as you didn't have BOTH on at the same time, things were all good in the hood. The Kuro is fascist about its inputs. You cannot plug two things into the same input, even if one is switched off. I was hoping to use this multiplexing as a way around the analog input shortage.

It's also a little weighty. Although not as fat-assed as my last TV, this thing weighs 130 Lbs. There's no way I'm hanging this on my wall.

Finally, the last small item is the sleep timer. I have a habit of passing out in front of the TV. It comes on quickly. Too quickly to be able to manually turn on the sleep timer countdown in time. Instead of having to manually tell the TV to turn itself off in 45 minutes, It would be nice if the TV would just auto-shut off at a user configurable time, say 2AM. If I happen to still be awake, I could hit the "snooze" button so it would instead shut off at 2:30AM.

The Alternatives
The Samsung LCDs are really nice if you're on a budget and/or don't want to go for a mansized TV.

A more expensive alternative is the Kuro Elite. The most important specs seem to be the same as the regular Kuro, so I don't really know why it's a grand more expensive. Supposedly it streams video off your network, but I wouldn't bother trying this. Usually it doesn't work, and if it does, it only streams gimpy formats like mpeg4 or divx. I ended up writing/creating my own solution for this using mplayer, Perl, the StreamZap PC Remote Control and some old laptops. It actually works and handles every video format on Earth.

The Verdict
If you're in the market for an upper-crust TV, you should definitely check out the Kuro. It rocks my world.

Roku SoundBridge Review

Overview
The Roku Soundbridge is a well thought out streaming music player created by Roku Labs. It plays a ton of different formats like mp3, ogg, wma, wav, m4a, even flac. You can download the simple and elegant open source Firefly Media Server from their site, but it works with just about any UPnP media server application, like iTunes or TonkyVision or Yahoo Music Engine.

It can also play internet radio, so you can listen to any radio station in the world that has a web presence.


The Details
Dude, forget burning CDs or manually loading songs onto some flash or harddrive based music playing device. You hook this bad boy into your network, either with ethernet or with wifi and bing bang bong, it will automatically detect all the media servers on your network. You pick media server, then a playlist, artist, album or song, and it'll start playing all your favorite Hilary Duff songs. All your music is stored in one central place in a neat and tidy format. No more stacks of CDs. Frag that.

You can create playlists either in your media software, or on disk by just listing out your songfiles in a text file ending in .m3u. Pretty handy if you're a scripter type. The device has a built-in web server/web UI as well as two control ports to which you can connect to get system information and control the music playback, respectively. There's even a module on cpan written by yours truly that will let you load up playlists and songs via the playback control port from your commandline. One of the niftier things about the SoundBridge is that you can take control of the display via the system control port and scroll whatever you'd like across the display, ranging from "Time to make the donuts" to "I hope you enjoy your VD" (Eh, that's Valentine's Day).

The device can stream internet radio without needing access to a computer on the network. It has a headphone jack so theoretically you could take it to an internet cafe, plug your headphones in and listen to streaming radio all day long. You'd look kinda silly though.

I have three devices sprinkled through-out my apartment, each with a different setup. One is hooked up to my Onkyo receiver via optical output, the other is hooked up to a boombox via the headphone jack and aux-in and the third is hooked up to powered computer speakers via headphone jack (we're a little short on space in that area). Speaking of space, the unit is a nice little tube shape that can fit into tiny spaces. It's also portable, so when I went to clean out the storage closet in the car port, I took one of the Roku's, and hooked it into my car stereo's aux-in
and voila, my awesome music collection shepherded me through the tedium. Pretty clever, I thought.

If you have a subscription to Yahoo Music, then you can enable music sharing and listen to all your rented DRM'ed music on the Roku. This and the streaming internet radio feature open up limitless music possibilities.

The Good
Everything I've mentioned thus far. I loved the first Roku I bought that I got 2 more matching ones.

The Bad
One feature that is missing that people have been bitching about is rewind/fast forward. You can skip songs, but you can't cue/review. I've learned to live without it, so it really isn't a big deal. In theory a future version of the firmware could fix this (by the way, updating the firmware is really easy, it notifies you that there's a new version and with your permission self updates).

The Alternatives
The competitor to this device is the Squeezebox by Slim Devices. I don't actually own one of these, but I know a little bit about them from talking to people who do. While for the most part they do similar things, there are some fundamental differences. With Roku, all of the logic to play music is in the firmware on the device itself. With Squeezebox, most of the logic is in the open source SlimServer, written in Perl. This allows you to monkey with the functionality more and opens up more possibilities in the future. Incidentally, I believe that Roku also works with SlimServer, so you have those possibilities as well with Roku.

SqueezeBox has Rewind/Fast Forward and it also can act as an ethernet bridge, so if you have a device in your entertainment center that can only do ethernet (like the original PS3), you could plug it into the Squeezebox which is also wireless.

I don't think that SqueezeBox works with rented DRM music (DRM 10), but I could be wrong. SqueezeBox is also taller than Roku, so it wouldn't fit in 2 of the 3 places Roku is now in my apartment.

SqueezeBox is also twice as expensive as the Roku, so it's harder to buy a whole bunch to sprinkle around.

The Verdict
Time to step out of 1998 and buy this thing.