Good grief guys. Arguing about picture quality on oled TVs for 192 posts.
Hardcore Lanner here. Lans were awesome. Haven't Lanned in years though. I miss it, but the last few Lans were just an exercise in nostalgia. Lans are pretty much dead. Times change. It sucks. Bud Lindemann once said, "We're gonna miss what progress takes from us."
Smart phones, social media make us less human. I read stories all the time about how people are having less sex because they're on their damn phones. I miss the pre smart phone days when people had to be social. In the past few years a lot of people I know met their spouse online. I'm going to one such wedding on Saturday. It's a new twist on the concept of an arranged marriage. Whatever happened to the days of meeting a woman at a bar, striking up a conversation over a cigarette, and getting her phone number?
I was just thinking the other day that people in the 1800s didn't have much in the way of entertainment, but they probably had great friends, great relationships. They knew how to tell story. How to make joke. When to charge in, when to tread softly in conversation. You know everyone in the village and everyone knows you. Reputation. Security. Trust. Social media takes away from actual social skills. I find myself frittered away time on learning useless things or following cheap entertainment. What a poor use of my short life. And Life is, after all, a time management problem. But more on that later.
You can't have a home theater without a home. The push for multi-dwelling units over single family homes is a tectonic threat to home theater. Furthermore, homes are being built at half the rate they were in the early 2000s. There a lot of reasons for this, but supply remains tight. We may not be in a housing bubble. Demand has been exceeding supply for almost seven years now. People believe the next 2008 is around the corner. They believe home values will deflate. They may be wrong.
The middle class is generally not doing as well as it did pre-2008. Home theater is an extravagance. I would bet that the mid 2000s was a great time for home theater. But home prices are way up, and middle class life is increasingly hard to reach. There are many reasons for this.
And to top it off new movies are pretty much awful, humanless drivel. Out of all the new Star Wars movies, only Rogue One was good. The Marvel movies are mostly awful. Perhaps the well has gone dry. Call it the anxiety of influence. China money. Artists not being bored enough in an age of social media to create a human masterpiece. Or all of the above, but the fact is they don't make movies like Goodfellas anymore.
TV shows, streaming, is where all the money and talent are going. TV shows don't demand a home theater the way Star Wars or Lawrence of Arabia does. Who would go to a movie theater to watch an episode of the Crown? Don't get me wrong, that show was very well done. But it doesn't demand a theater or surround sound.
Which brings me to gaming and the future of home theater. At one time, Creative used to sell sound cards. They sold a ton of Sound blasters and audigys in the 90s and early 2000s. If you didn't have a sound card you were missing out and you knew it. By the mid 2000s Microsoft had had enough of crashes and compatibility problems and they got rid of EAX. Sound cards still exist, but they're a niche product now.
Atmos/DTSX could be the new EAX, but it's not being marketed well at all. Most games are mixed for 5.1. For pc gamers, pinnacle surround would be a Logitech Z906 which consists of bloated bass and tweeter less speakers. But it's the top choice because of the cost and learning curve.
What's missing from the industry is package, a kit, that just works. That's accessible to people who know nothing about audio but want Atmos surround.
And Home theater is a pain in the ass. Running cables. Getting all the equipment to talk to each other properly. Fun isn't supposed to be work. But setting up home theater is work. Which brings me back to the question of time management.
Kierkegaard once wrote an essay about how humans rotate their hedonistic pleasures the way a farmer rotates his crops. I prefer to think of as rotating my hobbies; rotating my learning, but life certainly has its seasons, and I'm not even the same person I was just four years ago. I enjoy work more now. I enjoy the challenge. I'm more patient. I'm less fun. Less alive. More adult. I don't even really speed anymore.
A Home theater requires time. It takes a lot research, effort, and most people just want to game or be entertained. The level of impatience in modern society is growing. The most predictive test in psychology that I know of is called the "cookie test". You can Google it and watch some cute videos of kids going crazy over a cookie. To say the least, the ability to delay gratification predicts success. And our new economy's whole purpose is instant gratification.
Also, practically speaking, speakers are incompatible with services like Discord because your microphone will feed your sound into their headset. For epic single player games like Skyrim or Witcher 3, a home theater, atmos adds a lot. But for twitch games like CSGO, it adds nothing.
I believe pc and console gaming is an untapped market for home theater, but they have to market it better, get the gaming studios on board with Atmos, and make a product that's easy to set up for newbs. Perhaps a modular product, but everything under one brand name, product line. Like a Sony Gaming Line that features TVs, receivers, subs, and speakers together in one product line.
