[SoAmusing777]

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I won't buy another Panny plasma until they fix the image retention issues. Having the Borderlands 2 UI burnt into my st30 for 3 weeks was terrifying. My next tv will be a Samsung and still a plasma unless Panny steps up. Bring on 4k res Plasmas.

OLED will have to come down way in price before I would touch it.

 
Op. That's no good. 4k res? Are you kidding me? Useless. Yeah, it's really expensive, but wasn't every other tech expensive when it first came out? Yes.
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I have a huge collection of bootlegs (~3TB worth) that I have collected for the last 15 years or so. Lots through trades as well as a few servers (dimeadozen, Live Music Archive, and a few private servers) and I rip all of my cd's to flac as soon as I get them.
 
Yeah the E5's are amazing! I travel too much not to have something decent to listen to music with. I use them with a Rio Karma and even though its somewhat dated, it seems to drive them fine and natively plays flac files.  Never gamed with them only because I have my home theater system to rumble the house hahaha. My AVR is the Pioneer VSX-53 and it has what they call Headphone Surround but it just doesnt compare to the Magni and Mixamp. I run hdmi from my xbox to the AVR but Im guessing the headphone amp is just really lacking to adequately drive these bad boys.

Dang! I thought they were, lol. What do you travel for? Sweet. Well, I'd be curious to see what the E5's sound like with DH.

 

[NamelessPFG]

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I wonder the same Nameless. I'm also impressed, lol. You and I are on the exact same page as far as the KB goes. Again with the tech stuff, lol. What is a Wacom digitizer? lol. Power and size? Wait for this years octa-cores and 1080p AMOLED. Perfection Good to know. Okay, so are you saying I would have to RCA with the STAX on my receiver? What about a mixamp? lol. Doesn't T-mo have the best unlimited data plan since it's truly unlimited? I'd have to say your query is just about right. I'm interested in the Lambda's as well. It makes sense Glad to hear I'm not the only one that gets a little lost, lol. Haha, great great grandfather. I love how STAX have withstood the test of time.

 
Wacom, as you may know, is the dominant brand of standalone drawing tablets, commonly used in the digital art industry. The EMR (electro-magnetic resonance) digitizer technology that their standalone drawing tablets and Cintiq monitors are based on is also sold to third parties.
 
The "S-Pen" feature that Samsung keeps touting in their Galaxy Note products? It's a Wacom Penabled digitizer, the exact same sort that Windows Tablet PCs made over the last decade and the Cintiq 15X and 17SX models use. You can even use the same pens on each of them, which doesn't usually happen with Wacom products; Penabled, Graphire, Bamboo, Intuos, and Cintiq pens aren't even interchangeable most of the time, even within each product line.
 
It's actually kind of remarkable how competent vintage audio equipment can be by today's standards. People still seek out 1970s integrated receivers, particularly Sansui, Marantz, or Pioneer equipment. The Koss ESP models from that time period (ESP/6, ESP/9, ESP/10) also have a slight following, but generally weren't as favored as the Stax offerings from the same time. And for loudspeakers, there are the classic Quad ESL-57 and ESL-63 models that people will go to great lengths to refurbish if anything goes wrong with them.
 
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Go look up OLED. Seriously. It will put CRT, Plasma, everything to shame.

 
As good as OLED tech can be, it's still a fixed-pixel technology and must have everything scaled to its native resolution. CRTs don't have that problem, being an analog technology, and it's part of the reason they make such excellent gaming displays. Remember, I'd like to have 240p signals from 5th-gen-and-prior consoles looking their best along with 4K on the same display, and resolution rescaling puts a damper in that.
 
What I'd like to see is something that actually replicates the CRT's lack of native resolutions and next to nonexistent input lag without the need for a bulky vacuum tube. Lasers instead of electron guns might work...
 
Believe me, if there was a worthy replacement for the GDM-FW900 out there, I'd be all over it in the blink of an eye. But we've had over a decade of display development, and no tech developed since has surpassed a top-tier aperture grille CRT like that on all fronts. You always have to deal with native resolutions and a bit more input lag, and the flat-panel displays with higher image quality (plasmas and IPS LCDs with RGB LED backlighting, mostly) usually have more input lag and lower response times with only 60 Hz refresh, while those with faster response times and refresh rates at 120 Hz or more (TN LCDs) have terrible image quality, especially when viewed off-axis.
 
And to insult us even further, most of those current "120 Hz" HDTVs don't actually accept 120 Hz video signals, completely missing the point. You have to buy a PC monitor to be guaranteed that it'll deliver the advertised refresh rate, and even then, they're almost all TN LCDs and 1920x1080 resolution when I expect no less than 1920x1200, and would prefer 2560x1440 or even 2560x1600 if there was a video interface that could even handle those resolutions at 120 Hz. (2560x1600 at 60 Hz already requires a dual-link DVI connection, and I'm not sure about the limit for DisplayPort since it's a relatively new and unused interface.)
 
Yeah, I've been rambling on for a while...still kind of sick about how technology has regressed in certain ways when I'm expecting complete progression. New technology is supposed to be better at every single thing, but things clearly don't pan out that way, do they?

 

[Evshrug]

Hailin,
Did you leave borderlands 2 on with the contrast dialed up to 100 for like a week straight? LoL! If I had the money, my own place, and not a plasma of my own, I would totally offer to buy that Plasma from you! As it is, I recommend you DON'T have contrast turned up all the way, in fact keep it dialed down to around 50-60 contrast for the first 100 hours, else you do risk burn-in and a shortening of the overall life of the display phosphorus. Like I said, image burn-in is only as likely as with a CRT, so give the screen (& yourself) a break every few hours, and don't leave a game paused while you go to school or sleep. You had to have had the game running for a few days to get burn-in as severe as you describe.



Nameless,
As I said, I love my Wacom tablet :3

Also agree it "would be" great if current HDTVs had the same native input "speed" as CRTs. Internal TV up scalers (or down scalers) are part of the lag, but so are other types of image processing (like contrast sharpening, noise reduction, etc). You already knew that, but apparently, commercial "panels" like you might see in a mall (or abused in an airport) are stripped bare of all that processing overhead, and bring input lag down to very low levels. They're supposed to be the same panels as placed in consumer TVs and cheaper, but I didn't find a better deal than I got. That also explains part of why computer monitors have less lag than LCD HDTVs (I wanted to buy the hddvddhhvdhvvddvhdd so bad!).

Also, display port isn't as widely adopted as VGA and DVI, but it is easy to find models of graphics cards and monitors that feature the port. While HDMI is limited to only 60 Hz video refresh signal (and why TVs that advertise "smooth motion" 120hz must use that processing that creates fake 'tweener frames that IMO do more harm than good), Display Port supports 17.28 Gbit/s of effective video bandwidth, twice the bandwidth of HDMI and enough for four simultaneous 1080p60 displays (CEA-861 timings) or 2,560 × 1,600 × 30 bit @120 Hz (CVT-R timings). It also has the potential of driving 4k resolution monitors (why?), a feature introduced in January last year in ATI's HD7000 series graphics cards. Since Plasmas have a native 600 Hz refresh, IMO it would be awesome if they had display port connections. I guess that's not going to happen though, the majority of people like to sit close to their monitors rather than sit back and have the size scaled up to match.

Personally, I'd like a nice large screen I can sit back from in a comfy chair (with some kind of ergonomic surface for keyboard & mouse/tablet, preferably something that can fold away like an airplane armrest table), hooked up to a powerful computer for serving up a variety of entertainment and work display (I'd like to be able to pace and consider my work like I do my paint canvases). That sounds ideal to me for a home setup. Then, a tablet for portable computing (and always a smartphone). Until we invent holographic displays that scale to any size from a small device, the previously description is my idea of the most seamless and comfortable computer setup.

 

[SoAmusing777]

Quote:

 
Wacom, as you may know, is the dominant brand of standalone drawing tablets, commonly used in the digital art industry. The EMR (electro-magnetic resonance) digitizer technology that their standalone drawing tablets and Cintiq monitors are based on is also sold to third parties.
 
The "S-Pen" feature that Samsung keeps touting in their Galaxy Note products? It's a Wacom Penabled digitizer, the exact same sort that Windows Tablet PCs made over the last decade and the Cintiq 15X and 17SX models use. You can even use the same pens on each of them, which doesn't usually happen with Wacom products; Penabled, Graphire, Bamboo, Intuos, and Cintiq pens aren't even interchangeable most of the time, even within each product line.
 
It's actually kind of remarkable how competent vintage audio equipment can be by today's standards. People still seek out 1970s integrated receivers, particularly Sansui, Marantz, or Pioneer equipment. The Koss ESP models from that time period (ESP/6, ESP/9, ESP/10) also have a slight following, but generally weren't as favored as the Stax offerings from the same time. And for loudspeakers, there are the classic Quad ESL-57 and ESL-63 models that people will go to great lengths to refurbish if anything goes wrong with them.
 
 
As good as OLED tech can be, it's still a fixed-pixel technology and must have everything scaled to its native resolution. CRTs don't have that problem, being an analog technology, and it's part of the reason they make such excellent gaming displays. Remember, I'd like to have 240p signals from 5th-gen-and-prior consoles looking their best along with 4K on the same display, and resolution rescaling puts a damper in that.
 
What I'd like to see is something that actually replicates the CRT's lack of native resolutions and next to nonexistent input lag without the need for a bulky vacuum tube. Lasers instead of electron guns might work...
 
Believe me, if there was a worthy replacement for the GDM-FW900 out there, I'd be all over it in the blink of an eye. But we've had over a decade of display development, and no tech developed since has surpassed a top-tier aperture grille CRT like that on all fronts. You always have to deal with native resolutions and a bit more input lag, and the flat-panel displays with higher image quality (plasmas and IPS LCDs with RGB LED backlighting, mostly) usually have more input lag and lower response times with only 60 Hz refresh, while those with faster response times and refresh rates at 120 Hz or more (TN LCDs) have terrible image quality, especially when viewed off-axis.
 
And to insult us even further, most of those current "120 Hz" HDTVs don't actually accept 120 Hz video signals, completely missing the point. You have to buy a PC monitor to be guaranteed that it'll deliver the advertised refresh rate, and even then, they're almost all TN LCDs and 1920x1080 resolution when I expect no less than 1920x1200, and would prefer 2560x1440 or even 2560x1600 if there was a video interface that could even handle those resolutions at 120 Hz. (2560x1600 at 60 Hz already requires a dual-link DVI connection, and I'm not sure about the limit for DisplayPort since it's a relatively new and unused interface.)
 
Yeah, I've been rambling on for a while...still kind of sick about how technology has regressed in certain ways when I'm expecting complete progression. New technology is supposed to be better at every single thing, but things clearly don't pan out that way, do they?

I had no clue. Look at you. Just a little technologic dictionary. Well, that's really cool. Yup, I agree. Lots of things made then are better. It's stupid. Blame the market though. Are you sure OLED is fixed? Anyway, yeah, but OLED has an insane, everything! Response time, contrast ratio, power consumption, weight to performance, viewing angle, all of it. So I guess CRT beats it for older games? So you're saying that 240p comes in at 240p on your CRT? I don't get it. How do you even hook up a console to the GDM? OH my, yeah, I know that 120hz an on is just BS. Yes, it is sad about the regression.

 

[Mad Lust Envy]

My Compass 2 is on it's way! I will be realistic and expect it here early next week.

Had a rough day yesterday with my insomnia.

Today is gonna be A40+Mixamp 2013 day.

I'm also gonna be using both the 5.8 and 2013 Mixamp + My SA-31 to see how they all sound with music to find out just how warm the 2013 Mixamp is, and how bright the 5.8 is compared to the SA-31 which is mostly neutral with some warmth.

Doing some frequency tests with the Mixamp 2013 via USB on my PC. The Mixamp distorts anything below 140hz. A shame. That's basically ALL the bass. Tried it with 3 headphones. All the same. It sounds like sticking a paper cup on a bicycle's spokes and going fast. Ah well. I need to figure out if it's just because of doing audio through USB or not.

update: It was. I ran a 3.5mm cable from my SA-31's headphone out to the Mixamp's mp3 input, and it no longer distorts. Good.

 

[Hailin]

Quote:

My Compass 2 is on it's way! I will be realistic and expect it here early next week.
Had a rough day yesterday with my insomnia.
Today is gonna be A40+Mixamp 2013 day.
I'm also gonna be using both the 5.8 and 2013 Mixamp + My SA-31 to see how they all sound with music to find out just how warm the 2013 Mixamp is, and how bright the 5.8 is compared to the SA-31 which is mostly neutral with some warmth.
Doing some frequency tests with the Mixamp 2013 via USB on my PC. The Mixamp distorts anything below 140hz. A shame. Tried it with 3 headphones. All the same. It sounds like sticking a paper cup on a bicycle's spokes and going fast. Ah well.

I was looking at the Compass2 the other day when you brought it up. Looking at the inputs alone it looks like a solid winner. After this headphone spree I was on this weekend I will be looking at an amp next.
 
 
Quote:

Hailin,
Did you leave borderlands 2 on with the contrast dialed up to 100 for like a week straight? LoL! If I had the money, my own place, and not a plasma of my own, I would totally offer to buy that Plasma from you! As it is, I recommend you DON'T have contrast turned up all the way, in fact keep it dialed down to around 50-60 contrast for the first 100 hours, else you do risk burn-in and a shortening of the overall life of the display phosphorus. Like I said, image burn-in is only as likely as with a CRT, so give the screen (& yourself) a break every few hours, and don't leave a game paused while you go to school or sleep. You had to have had the game running for a few days to get burn-in as severe as you describe.

I was a little addicted when I figured out the pirate vault glitch. I never left it on the screen static. I had the contrast at 83 (custom setting) yes a little high but ST series are well known for being darker then the other series of panny tvs. The 2011 and 2012 series both have been known to have image retention issues at least the ST as I witnessed with my own eyes. CNet did a IR/Burn-in test on the ST series and Samsung D550 series tvs. The Pannies failed horribly. I also bought a demo model (got it for a great price) so it was well past that 100 hour mark. So now I have my xbox set to 63 (looks ok but sort of dull in comparison.) for contrast and my PS3 at 83 for strictly movie watching.
 
Honestly I wish I had kept my old Panny it was only 720p and only had one HDMI but that picture was stunning and natural and blew this new one out of the water. My friend still has it and got a stinking good deal and he like to tell me every month how much he adores the picture.

 
TLDR version: Yah I sort of screwed up but didn't.

 

[Mad Lust Envy]

I stopped worrying about burn in and image retention. My Panny 65ST30 always has some when I play games with bars and the like, but it goes away. The longest to remain were some boxes and life bar from Castlevania: Harmony of Despair, which I have logged in over 1000 hours on. I expected it, but since I have stopped playing, it is almost all nearly gone. You really only see the IR on static white backgrounds and certain shades of green anyways, and you have to be close to see it.

The C4 icon on Black Ops was also problematic as I always played that game. That has disappeared ages ago too.

If you're considering a plasma, expect some IR, but as long as you move on to other games/etc, it will eventually go away. If it's a game you see yoursel playing for months, then yes, it will remain a bit longer until you move on.

 

[Evshrug]

Hailin,
I assume you can turn the contrast back up a bit after those first 100 hours (83 is fine). I turned mine up. I've not had any serious burn-in yet, but then I average only 4-5 hours of gaming a day, the rest of the time the TV is off. I also run the black screen with white wiper if I've been playing a while, though it's just kind of an obsessive thing because I haven't really noticed much IR. My set was from 2010, I knew Panasonic was making changes to increase the maximum brightness in newer sets; that might've made IR a little more likely. My set is a TC-P42C2 (or just C2 series) model, pretty much the cheapest one at the time.

Mad,
Lords of Shadow? How did that take you so long!? :eek:
My roommate and I beat it in less than a week, it was a rental game for us.
Edit: oh, you mean some other Castlevania game. One of the super-hard 2D side scrolling classics, no doubt. I haven't played the side scrollers, but from what I hear 1000 hours may be impressively short.
I'd like to play more games via the gamefly service, but then again... Skyrim.

 

[NamelessPFG]

Quote:

I had no clue. Look at you. Just a little technologic dictionary. Well, that's really cool. Yup, I agree. Lots of things made then are better. It's stupid. Blame the market though. Are you sure OLED is fixed? Anyway, yeah, but OLED has an insane, everything! Response time, contrast ratio, power consumption, weight to performance, viewing angle, all of it. So I guess CRT beats it for older games? So you're saying that 240p comes in at 240p on your CRT? I don't get it. How do you even hook up a console to the GDM? OH my, yeah, I know that 120hz an on is just BS. Yes, it is sad about the regression.

 
I thought I explained the Wacom thing clearly enough. Perhaps it would be easier to demonstrate it first-hand.
 
OLED is a promising display tech for sure, but as I said, the native resolutions mean that everything has to be scaled or processed to that resolution, which adds a bit of input lag and forces you to choose between 1:1 (or 2:1 for really low resolutions) pixel mapping that leaves a lot of unused screen space, or a stretched image that has scaling artifacts (or, worse, does not take different aspect ratios into account).
 
Yeah, what I meant by the CRT resolution thing is that you feed it 240p, and if it can sync to the signal, you get 240p. (It won't be mistaken for 480i, either; that trips up a lot of video processors.) You feed it 1080p, you get 1080p. This direct display process also helps keep the input lag down.
 
The GDM-FW900, being a professional PC graphics monitor (these things cost $2,500 brand new!), has the typical DE-15 VGA port and a set of five BNC connectors for its second input. Different physical jacks, but still RGBHV interfaces (as well as RGsB, because Sony loves sync-on-green for some reason).
 
I don't use it with my consoles at the moment because, like most VGA monitors, it cannot sync to 240p RGB signals (15 KHz horizontal sync, whereas most VGA monitors only accept 31 KHz at minimum), and component video requires a Y/Pr/Pb to RGB transcoder. HDMI would require an HDFury, as I've discussed before.
 
However, I do have a planned workaround in installing a video capture card in my PC and using software with said card to view the captured video in real-time. This adds a bit of input lag, but I could record and stream my console games with ease. Even then, I could get around the input lag by adding a video splitter of some sort. (More reason to get an HDFury, I suppose, since later revisions do output both HDCP-free HDMI and VGA simultaneously.)

 

[Mad Lust Envy]

Mad,
Lords of Shadow? How did that take you so long!? :eek:
My roommate and I beat it in less than a week, it was a rental game for us.
Edit: oh, you mean some other Castlevania game. One of the super-hard 2D side scrolling classics, no doubt. I haven't played the side scrollers, but from what I hear 1000 hours may be impressively short.
I'd like to play more games via the gamefly service, but then again... Skyrim.

Harmony of Despair is a multiplayer game, where up to 6 people run through 11 levels (chosen before starting). It's a game based enbtirely off loot and rare drops. Think of it like a side scrolling MMO or Borderlands, except each chapter can be as short as a minute if you're good enough, or if you run through every nook and cranny takes like 10 minutes each.

It's a LOT of fun, and every character gains their specials/levels in a different manner. The game is ADDICTING.

Came out on the 360 and PS3. The 360's came out a year longer and is quite empty. The PS3 one is a bit more lively but it's not as active as a like a few months ago. I've done everything in the game and then some, which is why I've clocked in so many hours. Some boss drops take an eternity to get. Lots of boss rushing.

Here's an example....

[VIDEO]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kI0tkSHsgk[/VIDEO]

 

[Vader2k]

Just wanted to mention that my Magni arrived today.  Woohoo!  It's slightly smaller than I envisioned, actually.  Now if only I had some headphones for it... Most likely I'm gonna go with the K702 Annies, but I'll decided by friday.  I suppose I could try my PortaPros on it in the meantime...
 
Anyway, back to the current discussion.

 

[Mad Lust Envy]

Congrats on the Magni!

I'm currently writing my review of the A40s, then the Mixamp 2013 Edition. Spoiler being 7.5/7.5/7.5

 

[Vader2k]

Thanks!

 

[Mad Lust Envy]

Yeah, I was also surprised at how small the Magni and Modi were. Stacked together they are around the size as Fiio E9/E9K alone.

 

[Vader2k]

Yeah, I remember you mentioning that.  If I'm remembering the size of the Mixamp correctly (I'm at work), I'm guessing it's depth is about the same as the Magni's.  If so, I suppose I could sit the Mixamp on top of it.  But my "new gadget" paranoia will likely result in placing them side by side.