Just like What Hi-Fi?, the worlds of TV and home cinema have managed to cram in a huge amount over the past 50 years.
TV technology and picture quality have changed dramatically: we have moved from small colour CRT (cathode-ray tube) sets, to huge high-tech flatscreens capable of showing millions of pixels and amazing 4K images.
On the home cinema side, we’ve seen format wars, and a move from stereo to surround sound with newfound levels of immersion; while the age of streaming has introduced a dizzying amount of content for us all to experience.
As part of our own 50th Anniversary celebrations, we reached out to some of the industry’s veterans for their perspectives on how the TV and home cinema markets have changed over the past five decades. Has it all been positive and plain sailing, or have there been challenges along the way?
This is what they had to say.
TV’s transformation
You can’t get away from the fact that the good ol’ TV has changed dramatically since 1976. It’s something that isn’t lost on John Archer, a hugely experienced freelance TV reviewer with more than 30 years of box-watching and box-moving under his belt…
“Everything about them has changed radically over the past 50 years, from their basic shape and size to the types of technology making their pictures, the resolutions and vividness of the pictures they show, the immersiveness of the sound accompanying their pictures, and their profound shift from being totally passive entertainment devices to becoming the smartest product in the room.
Not that this rate of TV change was particularly obvious in 1976. We were in the midst of a Cathode Ray Tube TV run then, that stretched all the way from the 1930s through to the early 2000s - a length of reign that is hard to imagine in today’s ever-changing TV market.
As someone who found himself, early on in his TV reviewing career, having to get a massive Sony Trinitron CRT TV weighing 90kg up two flights of stairs to a flat that felt smaller than the TV, the shift to much slimmer LCD TVs in the late 1990s has to stand out as one of the TV world’s most welcome watershed moments - even though the picture quality of those early ‘flat’ TVs actually left a lot to be desired compared with the best CRTs they superseded.
These early flat TV performance-concerns meant that, even though reviewing TVs had become much less wearing on my back, it wasn’t until plasma screens started to hit their stride in the early 2000s that the flat TV generation really came of age. Using self-emissive pixels enabled these TVs to deliver the sort of contrast, at last, that home cinema fans had craved since CRT left the scene.
The significance of plasma screens grew significantly - literally - as brands found ways of making them at screen sizes that would have been unthinkable in CRT’s day.
I had enjoyed hanging out with rear-projection TVs for a while as brands looked for ways to turn living rooms into home cinemas, but big-screen plasma TVs were just so much more generally manageable than any rear-projection option. Though, having said that, it did take four men and a crane to get a 103-inch Panasonic plasma TV into my test room back in the day…
Ironically, one of the biggest reasons for plasma’s ultimate demise came from the final TV innovation that stands out to me as genuinely revolutionary: High Dynamic Range.
Plasma TVs just couldn’t deliver the sort of brightness and colour intensity the colossally expanded light ranges and colour gamuts associated with HDR without using huge amounts of power or suffering from the dreaded screen burn effect.
OLED TVs came along to pick up the self-emissive TV baton - though it has actually really been only over the past four or five years that OLED TVs have really got to grips with what HDR can truly bring to the picture quality table.
HDR hasn’t been without its problems. It’s still challenging for budget TVs to deliver HDR effectively, for instance, and content creators have been frustratingly slow to truly embrace it. But once you have experienced HDR delivered well, going back to SDR feels like going back to the dark ages.”
Arcam co-founder John Dawson agrees and also notes that changes to TV technology have been mirrored in improvements to the methods and techniques actually employed to help production: “The picture quality of TV has improved beyond the wildest dreams of the 1976 consumer.
Back then, colour TV broadcasting in the UK was less than 10 years old. We only had the cathode ray tube in diagonal sizes of up to about 26 inches, using the shadow mask and, later, Sony's Trinitron technology, to generate a colour image in our living rooms.
Professional archiving was possible only on film or on videotape; the home versions of the latter (VCRs) had picture noise and very poor resolution, about 200 lines compared with the theoretical 576 active lines of standard broadcast TV.
Since then, the advances in TV cameras in resolution, geometry, colour depth and accuracy have been profound, largely driven by the revolution in computing and microelectronics fabrication. This has been mirrored in display performance (think 4K, 10-bit flat panels of all sizes), delivery (over the air, satellite and streaming video) and storage options (DVD, Blu-ray, hard drives etc).”
Dawson also makes the point that there hasn’t been a huge increase in cost for the consumer: “When colour TVs were first sold in the UK in 1968, the average price of a 20 inch set was about £300.
That would also have bought you more than half of an Austin/Morris Mini! Prices remained comparable in 1976, but with larger tube sizes and improved reliability. Interestingly, most sets were rented rather than purchased outright. Miraculously, one can still buy a reasonable flatscreen TV today for the same amount of money!”
Bringing the cinema home
Obviously, picture is only one half of the TV/AV equation. Where does sound fit in? And how has the journey brought us to the immersive formats we have now?
Roger Batchelor is a freelance consultant who has worked with Denon for the best part of 35 years.
“1976 was early days for colour TV in the UK, and for high-quality audio from TV for most people. It always fascinated me, though, that Saul Marantz included a “TV” input on his original Audio Consolette pre-amplifier in 1952!
During the 1980’s, I was branch manager for a UK Hi-Fi/TV retailer. In those days our TV showroom was at the front of the store with a separate Hi-Fi demo room at the rear. Not until the BBC “NICAM” stereo TV sound test broadcasts in the mid-’80s did we consider putting a TV and VCR in the Hi-Fi demo room.
By the early 1990s, AV amplifiers were gaining ground in the UK, and this was the first opportunity for people to experience just how good TV sound could be. These were exciting times and, by 1995, the first Laser Discs with Dolby AC-3 encoded soundtracks were released, providing AV companies with a significant uplift in sound quality for their demonstrations at shows and in retailer demo rooms.
When the DVD format arrived a couple of years later, “Home Cinema” really took off, helped by the rapid development of TVs, from rear-projection sets to plasma screens and eventually LCD and beyond. In addition, front projectors were becoming more affordable for those prepared to dedicate the space to accommodate a large screen.
Around the same time, Lucasfilm THX certification provided a boost to AV products at the high-end for both electronics and loudspeakers. THX also started to provide training courses for AV industry personnel, swiftly followed by associations such as the Home Acoustics Alliance (HAA) and the Imaging Science Foundation (ISF). Along with training from AV manufacturers and distributors, these helped considerably to drive the industry forward in terms of knowledge and expertise.
This period also saw the rapid growth in custom installation, which had a profound effect on the industry with new companies being established to specialise in this market. More training courses and seminars became available from CEDIA and the UK’s Clarity Alliance, and all these organisations continue to offer education for professionals.
On the other hand, AV amplifiers and processors were becoming too complex for customers who wanted a straightforward set-up that they could install themselves.
Manufacturers began to realise this and eventually made it much easier to install an AV amplifier by developing a concise on-screen setup guide to talk the user through each stage of installing an amplifier and multi-channel speaker system.
As TV streaming has become dominant due to its convenience there is the downside of the reduction in sound quality compared to that available from Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray discs.
For the very best sound, you can’t beat a disc with a Dolby True HD or DTS-HD Master Audio encoded soundtrack playing through an AV amplifier connected to a dedicated speaker package. Furthermore, Dolby Atmos is even more effective from a disc than it is from streaming, provided suitable speakers are installed.”
Eric Kingdon, is a technical marketing consultant for Sony and has had a hand in a number of the brand’s Award-winning AV (and hi-fi) products over the years. He thinks a combination of factors have helped get us to where we are today…
“I guess the biggest benefit is the shift to a greater cinematic experience, particularly in terms of quality and sheer size, which applies to both displays and delivery systems. Thanks to 4K, improved internet, superior compression and lossless coding systems, it’s a far cry from a simple Dolby surround add-on processor, with a matrixed mono rear sound.
In a way the industry worked together from recording to delivery, apart from the inevitable competing formats along the way. It’s also interesting how different aspects of technology fed off each other – hi-fi sound on analogue video recorders made people realise the possibilities for home theatre.
Even with optical discs, initially LP-sized, it began with analogue, then digital when more discrete channels brought the experience home. Digital technology has been responsible for the proliferation of content and devices.
The consumer has gained from systems that can integrate into almost any space, both personal and in the home.
DSP with greater power and computation has enabled virtual processing for height and additional channels simply not possible before – technology like 360 Spatial Sound Mapping has added more speakers without the need for further enclosures.
Manufacturers like Sony and stalwarts such as Dolby have all played their part. We’ve gained choice through quality streaming services and fuss-free connection thanks to the use of wireless systems. I also believe the media helped in highlighting the need to bring high-quality music and AV reproduction to a similar level of quality.
The past 50 years have been an exciting story, and we have gained so much – this whole area of entertainment drove innovation.”
The technology has improved, but it’s not perfect
As always seems to be the case with the evolution of technology, it hasn’t been a completely smooth ride. Rob Hay, Director of Marketing at AudioQuest, notes how important it has been to understand the shifts from a technical point of view, so the end user can enjoy the claimed benefits to their fullest.
“Every advance in cameras, microphones, production formats and content delivery has placed greater demands on the connections carrying the signal. From AudioQuest’s perspective, our role has remained remarkably consistent: to understand the technical requirements of each connection and do everything possible to avoid introducing distortion, corruption or disruption.
Even a seemingly simple aerial or coaxial cable deserves attention to its impedance, dielectric and termination. In the analogue era, shortcomings might have produced a slightly fuzzy picture; with digital, they are more likely to cause pixelation, dropouts or no picture at all.
HDMI promised to be the single cable that did everything, but its evolution has not always made life easier for consumers. Successive specifications, confusing “speed” claims, EDID communication problems and HDCP have all added complexity.
Gaming, meanwhile, has progressed from the simple electronic tennis of the Magnavox Odyssey to a vast range of consoles and games with their own demanding video and audio requirements; technology such as Unreal Engine now even helps to create some of our favourite films and television programmes.
Yet confusion is hardly new. From Betamax versus VHS and HD DVD versus Blu-ray to Dolby Digital, DTS and today’s Dolby Atmos systems, we have sometimes made progress feel more bewildering than exciting – and kept consumers reliant on specialist retailers and press to make sense of it all.”
As someone who has seen it change during my near two decades at What Hi-Fi?, these words from Rob ring especially true:
“The experience is unquestionably better than it was in 1976. But as an industry we should remember that innovation only really succeeds when it is reliable, understandable and practical in a family living room.”
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