Dr Toole has a Phd from Imperial College and latterly is a lifelong CEDIA member after an illustrious career including Head of acoustical design for Harman International.

For anyone concerned with the room interaction effects of low frequencies there is a very cool set of (mostly comprehensible) lecture papers from 2002 online at the Infinity website entitled "Loudspeakers and Rooms for Multichannel Audio Reproduction".

So Troy and I were early adopters of the iPad. He being an arch geek had one on order for six weeks from Apple on line, myself being a retail supporter bought one from Myers on the day of release. I think I beat him to ownership by an hour or two ... The immediate implications for our business of the iPad are through it's Control 4 and Crestron home control applications.

Without a doubt the iPod and its associated digital music formats has been the most significant force in the consumers spectrum of music opportunity. There is a significant harbinger of doom for the specialist Hi Fi business within this phenomenon and much has been written in the popular press of late wherin the iPod has been put forward as the death knell of conventional stereo useage. The Herald Tribune recently ran an article titled “portability trumps fidelity for music fans” and a number of respected figures from the studio production end of things have appeared in the press bemoaning the intrinsic lack of fidelity in the formats used by their end users in comparison to the ultimate care they take at the production end to produce the most realistic rendition of the original recording.

The fact of obsolescence rests uncomfortably on our industry.

The classic prevailing example of obsolescence is of course the computer industry, where our old friend Moore's law has dictated the doubling of hardware capacity every two years.

from the CES 2010 is this very cool OLED screen with 40 percent transparency, this is very much from the annals of Sci Fi such as "Minority Report" and is a good example of narrative creating the techno magic that will no doubt soon be in everyday use.

We have just received the first examples of this much awaited divergent LCD tech screens from Sharp. Basically they use an extra yellow Pixel in addition to the red green and blue and as such are offering new levels of brightness and vibrancy in their image reproduction capabilities.