How can an average person navigate the maze of audio/video technologies in a home theater system? Turn to Mark Fleischmann's Practical Home Theater: A Guide to Video and Audio Systems. The 20th anniversary edition has been thoroughly revised and updated for 2022. The ultimate answer book for beginners and intermediate-level readers, it tells you everything you need to know when shopping for video and surround sound gear including how to read a spec sheet, how to separate fact from hype, and how to get good value for your money. It weighs the pros and cons of 4K and 8K Ultra HDTV and display technologies such as LED-backlit LCD, quantum-dot, OLED, and projection systems. Other video topics include HDR picture-quality improvements, the HDR format war, refresh rates, smart TV, and the new HDMI 2.1 interface. The book dispels the confusion surrounding audio technologies from the new height-enhanced Dolby Atmos and DTS: X to older Dolby, DTS, THX, and Audyssey surround technologies. The book covers all formats under the sun including Blu-ray and DVD, DVRs, streaming from a multitude of devices, and wireless connectivity. And it explores often ignored topics such as buying a DTV antenna, power-line accessories, and cables. A richly detailed connections chapter tells how to hook up every component. By knowledgably guiding readers through the briar patch of video and audio, Practical Home Theater has become the standard reference work for home theater buffs. This edition is dated 2022 and will be sold between October 2021 and October 2022. Readers are warned to buy only the latest edition. Future annual editions will continue to track changes in home theater technology.

Putting together your first audio system but don't know where to start? Want to upgrade a system that has never made you happy? Audio critic Mark Fleischmann has written this very brief how-to guide expressly for beginners and anyone else who needs to decode the technical rhetoric surrounding audio gear. In addition to the basics of loudspeakers, amplifiers, digital sources, turntables, and other products, he also offers pragmatic advice on how to put together a system, how to set up a system, how to collect a music library, and the act of listening itself. Mark was the audio editor of Home Theater and Sound & Vision and has written for Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and many other publications. He is also the author of Practical Home Theater.

Mark Fleischmann had planned to spend the final years of his career as a staff writer at an audio/video tech magazine -- until a foreign publisher bought it and more or less fired the entire staff. Having spent a long career as a lean mean writing machine, yet unable to re-establish his once-prosperous freelance writing career, he found he couldn't live without writing. So he started writing for the blogging platform Medium. Branching out beyond his former specialties of tech and music to explore topics previously off-limits, he pounded out interviews with musician and crime-author heroes, urban rants, spiky political commentaries, and goofy essays on a variety of subjects. This book is a compendium of that work from 2019-22. Except for the interviews, it is no longer available online. Since having his full-time writing career terminated at age 60, Mark has been approached by three different editors of the magazine that fired him, and has turned them all down.