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"But I Thought You Were My Friend!"

"But I Thought You Were My Friend!" (Footnote 1)

The relationship between audio reviewers and equipment designers is tricky at best. Reviewers judge a company's products and report their impressions to equipment-buying readers, often with significant consequences---positive or negative---for the manufacturer. Conflicts often arise because the manufacturer and reviewer have completely different agendas; the reviewer is responsible to his readers, the designer to his company.

This relationship is even more complex when a reviewer and manufacturer establish a friendship. With…

"But I Thought You Were My Friend!" Page 2

But will this company's actions affect the tone of any future reviews of their products? Not a chance. If this company has a new product that is superb, the praise will be just as glowing. If the product is poor, the criticism will be no more severe than if this incident never happened. It is just as great a sin to overly praise a product from a friendly manufacturer as to overly damn a product from an unfriendly one. The cardinal rule operating here is that the readers' interests come first---before anything else. The reviewer also has a duty to the more abstract concepts of serving audio…

"But I Thought You Were My Friend!" Letters

A letter in response appeared in Vol.14 No.12, December 1991

But I thought you were my friend!
Editor:
Robert Harley's "But I thought you were my friend!" article ("As We See It," September 1991) raises some interesting points. As a supplier of hi-fi equipment, I fall into the category of manufacturer vis-à-vis reviews.

Generally speaking, I am friendly with the press. Some of my favorite people even work for your august magazine. Sam Tellig (an old friend) has often taken pot shots at my products, and Corey Greenberg (friendship pending) even had the audacity to give a…

PDP-501MX 50" Plasma Monitor (SGHT Review)

The advance of plasma-display technology speeds on, and the Pioneer PDP-501MX is at the front of the line. This is the first plasma monitor on sale in the United States that is capable of displaying high-definition images, making it the world's most advanced, commercially available product of this type.Squeezing almost 1 million pixels into even a 50" display (measured diagonally) is quite an accomplishment. As soon as I pulled the unit out of the box and set it in its unobtrusive tabletop stand, I connected it to Panasonic's high-definition tuner box and fed the monitor an over-the-air HDTV…

PDP-501MX 50" Plasma Monitor (SGHT Review) Page 2

The company also notes that the monitor's electronics have several exclusive features, including one that is said to increase light output by prompting both the anode and cathode (front and back) of each plasma cell to fire. Other plasmas light only the cathode. Pioneer makes no specific claim about the degree of increase, but the monitor seemed plenty bright to me.

Pioneer also claims that each cell in the display is offset a bit, slanted sideways about 22 degrees. This is said to mitigate the "screen-door" effect—all those square cells giving the faceplate a screen-like imprint. I didn…

PDP-501MX 50" Plasma Monitor (SGHT Review) Page 3

It turns out that the proper color settings for HDTV are woefully off for NTSC. Fortunately, the monitor has four memory locations for user-specified picture settings, which lets you store different settings for HDTV and NTSC. This solves the problem. Still, after storing the picture settings for each input, users must wade through menus to make the change every time they go from NTSC to HDTV, which is likely to be a frequent transition in the new world of digital television. If this problem of the disparity between the two signals is not solved soon, manufacturers are going to have to make…

PDP-501MX 50" Plasma Monitor (SGHT Review) Specifications

Sidebar 1: Specifications

PDP-501MX: plasma display
Screen size: 50" (diagonal)Aspect ratio: 16:9
Maximum resolution: 1280x768 (XGA)
Maximum horizontal scan frequency: 45kHz
Maximum vertical scan frequency: 60Hz
Inputs: composite (RCA or BNC), S-video, component (BNC), RGB (15-pin), RGB with vertical and horizontal sync (BNC)
Outputs: composite (BNC), 15-pin RGB
Dimensions: 48" by 28" by 3.9" (W-H-D)
Weight: 95 lbs.
Price: $25,000
Manufacturer: Pioneer Electronics, P.O. Box 1760, Long Beach, CA 90801, Tel. (800) 421-1404. Fax (310) 952-2260. www.…

PDP-501MX 50" Plasma Monitor (SGHT Review) Review System

Sidebar 2: Review System

Sources: Sony DVP-S7000 DVD player, Philips CDV488 LD player, Sencore 995 HDTV player, JVC SR-W320U W-VHS high-definition VCR
Display: Sony VPH-1292Q projector, Faroudja VP401 line quadrupler, Stewart StudioTek 130 screen (87" wide, 16:9)
Preamp/processor: Lexicon DC-1
Power amp: Carver AV-806 (6-channel)
Loudspeakers: Infinity Composition Prelude system
Cables: AudioQuest RGB-Three/sync video, AudioQuest Video-Z S-video, AudioQuest Video-2 component-video, AudioQuest Crystal speaker cables, AudioQuest Digital Pro digital cables, AudioQuest…

PDP-501MX 50" Plasma Monitor (SGHT Review) Calibration

Sidebar 3: Calibration

Jamie Wilson, the ISF technician who calibrated the Pioneer PDP-501MX for me, found the color-temperature settings of the first sample to be "pretty impressive right out of the box." But given how many places this set had been before it reached me, there was no way to know whether or not someone else had already changed the settings. Still, the monitor measured near the NTSC standard across the board; there seemed little need to adjust it. Given that, I saw no need to recalibrate the second sample.

Of course, the convergence is perfect: The red, green, and…

Bang For the Buck: Quality <I>vs</I> Cost

It was a powder blue Pinto. Brand new, it drove like a bowl of Jello with wheels. No matter how firmly I gripped the steering wheel, I had no confidence that it had any kind of relationship with the wheels on the road. And pickup? There was none. But because its designers had sacrificed all quality to build it cheaply, the Ford Pinto was equally cheap to rent when I did so back in 1980.

It's ironic that as editor of a magazine that addresses one of my main leisure activities—listening to music—I only occasionally read magazines connected with another of my passions: driving. (Faced with…