“For audiophiles, listening rooms are a bit like the weather. We talk about them, but few of us do much about them. We might experiment with speaker placement and listening-chair position, and some ambitious souls try to tame room problems with products like ASC Tube Traps. But not many of us go beyond that….”

“I thought it was the prettiest thing at CES last winter, and now it’s the prettiest thing in my home theatre room. The Sunfire Theater Grand (I’ve deferred to the American spelling because it’s a product name) has essentially the same chassis and finish of all Sunfire products, a brown burnished brushed aluminum case with rounded corners, with the same recessed window at centre front, and the addition of numerous pinpoint indicator lights, many of which are also control buttons…”

Highlights Include: Kimber Select KS-3035 Speaker Cable, Oracle Mentor Studio, Meadowlark Shearwater (Hot Rod), Cliffhanger CHS-2/SW-2, Paradigm Reference Active 40, Sunfire Theater Grand Surround Processor/Tuner, Myryad MI 120 Integrated Amplifier, MT 100 FM Tuner & MC 100 CD Player, Rega Mira Integrated Amplifier more….

“If this film stops people talking about Mon Oncle Antoine and Goin’ Down The Road as great Canadian films, then it will have served a good purpose, as far as I’m concerned. The Sweet Hereafter is probably the best Canadian film ever, and so far the highest grossing one at the box office. Atom Egoyan has woven a complex web of recollections of a school bus crash by those who survived and those whose children didn’t, as they talk to a lawyer, played by Ian Holm, who is trying to get a class action lawsuit going against the bus company. Almost entirely composed of flashbacks…”

“It used to be that the Criterion laserdiscs were the ones you paid all the extra money for to get a lot of extra special features, as well as exceptional image quality and packaging. Now this sort of thing has become common in the DVD world, with almost any release offering extra features: commentary from directors, etc. (often several), production documentaries, and other behind-the-scene insights. By such standards the Criterion Silence Of The Lambs seems almost sparse…..”

“Ever since I got this DVD I’ve been wondering why I liked it more on the small (51-inch) screen rather than on the big (60-foot) IMAX one. I think it has something to do with relating to a 40-foot-tall Mario Andretti; his easy intimacy and evident love for family, in particular, racing-driver sons and pet pig, Martini, seem to come across better on the smaller screen. Also, all the scenes shot from racing cars going 200 miles an hour, so carefully crafted and caught by the team led by director Stephen Low, seemed overly big and flat on the IMAX screen…”

“Ron Fricke has taken his time-lapse film camera to a variety of locations around the world,ranging from city centres in America and Europe to deserts, landmarks, and sculptures. We see familiar and unusual objects, architecture, and landscapes as the sun rises and falls, and clouds flash across the sky around them, with a musical score that underlines the greatness and futility of man’s struggle to form nature when, in fact, nature forms him…”

“It is very much to Kevin Costner’s credit that he could take a story without much story line to it, and make it into a long and lyrical film that sustains interest. It does so because of a combination of visual beauty, human drama on an epic scale (the survival of a race of people), and an individual love story. Strong performances by Graham Greene and Mary McDonnell, as Indian chief and love interest, respectively, hold one’s interest…..”

“I guess I’ve lumped these two films together because they both star Kurt Russell, who always looks as if he’s just swallowed a prune. Backdraft is set in Chicago and is about firemen and fires, with strong supporting performances from Scott Glenn, William Baldwin, Robert De Niro, and the usual riveting cameo by Donald Sutherland as a psychopath. The DVD transfer of this film faithfully retains its visual quality and exciting soundtrack, and I enjoy it, too, for all the Chicago locales, this being one of my favourite cities…”

“The claim is made in this DVD’s 8-page booklet that it outdoes its predecessor, GoldenEye, in special effects, and though it undoubtedly does, the earlier movie was a lot more fun, a lot of this in the antics of “the next girl”, Xenia Onatopp, not to forget Robbie Coltrane’s hilarious cameo as a Russian mobster. Somehow, the mood of Tomorrow Never Dies is more sombre, though the action never stops as Bond and his Chinese sidekick ride motorcycles and leap off tall buildings…”

“This is the film that introduced Richard Kiel as the chrome-toothed giant assassin, Jaws, who went on to become a much more sympathetic character in Moonraker. It also features the delectable Barbara Bach as a Russian agent who teams up with Bond to defeat villain Karl Stromberg, played with appropriate menace by Curt Jurgens. Many Bond fans could never see anyone but Sean Connery in the role, but I always liked the dapper rogue that Roger Moore made of Bond, a little seamier and more of an opportunist than the heroic Connery version…”

“HBO has done this wonderful film and its creator Tony Richardson a serious injustice in its DVD release. Instead of going back to original negatives or even a good print, it has mastered from a somewhat beat-up work or theatrical print with faded colour, lots of scratch sparklies, poor resolution, and mediocre screechy stereo sound. In other words, it’s pretty much the same old brew you saw on cable in a new cup…..”

“These two MGM movies fit well together as a review pair, both Sci-Fi, both big-budget, and both full of special effects. Though called a classic, the 1968 2001 least stands the test of time, in my view. It is overly long, ponderous, pretentious, full of bloated symbolism (starting with those stupid apes). What else can you say about a film that is dominated by a bland-voiced, neurotic computer…”

“High end audio gets away with murder. By the standards of the non-audiophile, most of the stuff we buy, and what we pay for it, can be explained only by a form of selective dementia affecting us in all areas having to do with reproduced sound. How many other industries cater to a demographic as fanatical, as restlessly compulsive, and as willing to suspend its collective disbelief? The answer may lie in another question: How many businesses are charged with selling something as slippery and unquantifiable as the aesthetics of sound?”

AIG Music Reviewer Marshall Butler digs deep into the ties that bind Canada, its politics, its marketing trends, and its rock and roll darlings, The Tragically Hip.

“An infinite number of marketing consultants working on an infinite number of advertising campaigns may eventually discover all that is Canada but, they would have been better off simply asking the Tragically Hip…”

“Now something of a pioneer in consumer active speakers, Paradigm is becoming very good at it, as the listening tests showed. Engineering a speaker from a line-level input onward gives the designers control of much more of the ultimate performance than when designing a speaker to work from an amplifier output. Of course, the amplifier(s) employed must be very good, or the design will be compromised…”

“Some speaker reviews are relatively short because there’s not much to say about yet another conventional or budget speaker; but others are so because the designer has done just about everything right, and has added to this synergy genuine creative intelligence. The latter is definitely the case here….”

“These monitor/subwoofer matched pairs come in a configuration that, as the width measurements suggest, stacks very neatly. And the neatness is augmented by the very nice veneered finish of the boxes, with their rounded corners and black front baffle. The subwoofer contains a high-pass filter, with an extra set of gold-plated 5-way posts to send it to the CHS-2. The speakers can also be bi-wired or amped…”

“The Oracle speaker project goes back quite a few years, and the Mentor Studio system is the culmination of that project, and its sleek finish reflects (quite literally) the tradition of craftsmanship associated with Oracle. Our review pair were finished in a shiny burgundy lacquer that looked as if it had been lovingly rubbed and polished by skilled hands…”

“In recent years more science has been applied to the design of both interconnect and speaker cables, though this has been exceeded only by the secrecy with which the science has been used. Hence, rather than a detailed description of the materials and design topography of this Select cable, we get in the brochure just a few words, followed by praise from a dealer: “All [Select] loudspeaker cables utilize our proprietary X38R core compound. This compound possesses unique acoustic damping and electrical properties….”