Audio Video

Today we have a little interlude into my RL ... no vessels and no SL memories for once .. :)

I have spent yesterday at the Top Audio & Video Show, the major fair in Italy dedicated to beautiful toys for grown up childern, from esotheric audio to Hi End Home Theaters :)

I have always been very fond of A/V: my DVD collection amounts to almost 1,000 titles (yes .. I hate the idea that they are becoming obsolete with the coming of High Definition) and I have two diffrent equipments not top of the line but good enough to make me happy.

The show has been an important moment every year for the last ten years. I can't say that it is perfect : hotel suite are not the best place to listen to equipments worth hundreds of thousands of euros, but I still love to get lost into the demos, attend seminars, listen to music beautifully reproduced or watch movies in little rooms that are theaters in their own right.

One of the best moments was the preview of the new High Definition version of Sleeping Beauty , restored and remastered to unprecedented splendor and that Disney is going to release worldwide in October. It was a great show: the images were fantastic and the audio had been perfectly remixed in multichannel. It is really incredible to think that the movie is 50 years old next January.

Another great moment - the one that actually had me writing this post - was the presentation of the Beatles Love DVD Audio. It collects many major Beatles hits remixed in multichannel. The idea of the disc arose out of a discussion of the late George Harrison (Aurora, do not faint if you are reading this! :) ) with Guy Laliberté, one of the founders of the Cirque du Soleil. The music is the soundtrack of the Love Circus of Soleil's production which is a resident show at the Mirage Casino in Las Vegas.

It was strange to listen to old classics in multichannel : I know that some of the old fans hate that disc (see some of the one star comments on the amazon page), because it is diffent from the sound they were used to, and I must confess that at the beginning it was a little strange to have all the reverberation coming from all over. But it lasted only few moments. The music was so beautiful that quickly took over and the technicalities were soon lost and only the enjoyiment was left. It was a great work of art and I loved it.

I could not visit everything in just one day : I did not have the time to visit two full floors and I missed many live events and demos and seminars, but it is always like that at these exhibits. It was great fun nevertheless :)

Only one negative point : nobody was using SL as a demo to show the beautiful High Definition panels. Who knows ... maybe next year :)

So long

W