Buzzwords to know in 2015
As far as years go, 2014 was one of the best. While we didn't get flying cars or hoverboards, home entertainment enthusiasts like myself got the LG 65EC9700 OLED TV, Tidal music streaming service and Amazon Echo, all in the same year.
But having so much cool A/V tech in 2014 presents a problem: What can possibly happen in 2015 that could top last year?
If it wasn't for CES 2015 it'd be easy to throw in the towel, buy one of the last plasmas on store shelves and go on living our lives like it's still 2014. Fortunately the mother of all technology shows gave us hope that there's a brighter, louder and more crisp tomorrow - all we need to do is be patient.
So, while we patiently await the hi-fi revolution Sony has promised us and LG's line of gorgeous - and I mean gorgeous - 4K OLED panels to drop in price, let's take a look ahead at the products, services and buzzwords that will consume every penny of my salary in 2015.
Big buzzwords in 2015
Before we walk the walk, we've got to talk the talk. Here are five terms you need to know in the new year:
4K / UHD
Almost everyone knows these two by now, but for the sake of review let's go over them one more time. 4K resolution is a misnomer of sorts; it describes any display device that has a horizontal resolution of 3,840 pixels. UHD on the other hand is a more general term introduced at CES 2013 that denotes any service or product that produces a picture beyond standard HD, generally referring to 4K or 8K.
OLED
OLED is awesome, plain and simple. Not enough for you? Fine. OLED, or organic light-emitting diode, TVs don't have a backlight in the traditional sense. Each individual pixel carries its own current and therefore can be individually controlled. Want a super bright pixel next to one that's completely black? No problem. OLED enables a TV to have a better contrast ratio and increases clarity whether you're standing far away or right up next to it.
HDR
HDR stands for high dynamic range, a concept content makers and manufacturers stole from digital imaging. HDR is used both to describe the way video is shot and how it appears on your 4K TV. Videographers capture darker shadows and brighter whites during the shooting process, then will separate them to create a wider array of possible colors.
Quantum Dot Displays
Another product in the "it's existed for years, but is just now coming to TVs" category is quantum dot. These little, bitty plates of nano-crystals sit between the backlight and LCD panel and enhance color depth by 20-30% by producing shades of color before hitting the red, green and blue sub-pixels. Both Samsung's new SUHD TV and LG's UF9400 4K UHD TV, due out later this year, will use variations of quantum dot.
Hi-Res Audio
Hi-resolution audio is the brilliant audio standard coined by Sony that, as they say, "is difference you can hear." If you understand lossless media, the idea here is the same: Capture the original recordings at 96kHz/24bit (or higher), keep the file as uncompressed as possible and stream it over Bluetooth to another Hi-Res-equipped device using a new codec called LDAC.
What's happening with TV, audio and streaming
in 2015?
Whether the content is there to support it or not - and trust me, it's not - 4K will become a more standard choice when buying a TV in 2015.
This is due, in part, to consumer demand. The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) reports that panel manufacturers collectively sold a whopping 800,000 UHD TVs in 2014 in the US alone. This represents a 500% increase over the number of 4K TVs sold in 2013.
What does the CEA expect this year? It expects consumers to buy three million 4K TVs in 2015.
Up until now though, UHD has been a relatively lawless place, with manufacturers posting their own double-speak in order to get the leg up on the competition.
The UHD Alliance, a collective of the biggest names in the industry (Sony, Samsung, Panasonic, Sharp, Netflix, DirecTV, Disney and Fox, to name a few…) have come together to create a strict set of standards that everyone will have to follow.
Whether or not the UHDA will stop corporate trickery remains to be seen, but we're cautiously optimistic this ocular Justice League can clear up a bit of the confusion around 4K in 2015.
What's happening in audio?
There have been hundreds of thousands of dollars sunk into advertisements that convince you that you need a new TV, monitor or graphics card. For years you've been told by every corner of the tech sector that visual fidelity is more important than your audio setup.
But that's going to change in 2015. Two established companies, LG and Sony, are willing to go all-in on audio this year.
Sony has always been a major player in audio, but this year's release of the new Hi-Res Walkman has the potential to put high-end audio in our pockets without ever touching a conversion program. The Walkman ZX2 takes MP3s and MP4s from your music library and upconverts them to "near hi-res quality," and has the ability to store and play most lossless media files like flac and wav.
High-end audio won't come cheap, though. Sony's audiophile-quality iPod competitor will cost upwards of $1,200 here in the US and £949 in the UK.
But while Sony's targeting the high-end of the audio spectrum, LG's attempting to dethrone Sonos as the king of multi-room home audio.
The system, called LG MusicFlow, uses any LG MusicFlow speaker like a node in a Wi-Fi network. You can connect to any number of speakers (from soundbars to surround sound systems, portable Bluetooth speakers to bookshelves) to your network and control them individually or together through the MusicFlow app.
We'll have a full review of the system when LG drops the needle on MusicFlow in March.
What's happening in streaming?
4K content was hard to come by in 2014. Netflix had one or two original series that supported high-resolution streaming as well as one or two high-profile films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But, by and large, there was little to no native 4K content to watch on any of those 800,000 4K TVs sold last year.
It'd be easy to give you a blanket statement like "there'll be more places to watch 4K in 2015." But we're numbers people. Just how much more content will we see? How much of it will sit behind a paywall? And when will cable providers get it together to broadcast at least the most basic cable channels in 4K? No really, someone tell me.
I don't have all the answers, and I'm not going to pretend I do. What I can say with confidence is that there were some game-changing events that happened in late 2014 that set the stage for a surge of native 4K content.
The biggest of these events was Amazon launching a slew of 4K content with the intent to challenge Netflix's high-resolution monopoly. Currently, there are 33 movies available in Ultra-HD, only about a fifth of which are available for free to Prime subscribers on Amazon Instant Video. Be sure to catch Amazon's original series like Transparent, Alpha House and Mozart in the Jungle, also available in 4K.
If you're still tied to cable, the fact that DirecTV launched a 4K satellite in December and Comcast started its own streaming app before the clock struck January 1 bodes very well.
What's coming next?
That's 2015 in a nutshell - 4K TVs will go vogue, music will finally get the kind of attention TVs had for the past 10 years and yes, there will finally be native 4K content to fawn over.
Before we wrap up this look into the crystal ball though, I'd like to take you a bit further. What can/should/needs to happen in the realm of hi-fi and home entertainment?
It's likely that Apple and Google will get into 4K this year by adding a selection of Ultra-HD films to their respective storefronts. And if both services get an upgrade that means the next iteration of the platforms' staple media players, the Apple TV and Nexus Player, won't be far behind.
So what will happen with all the standard HD TVs? While 1080p screens aren't out of the picture yet, industry analysts as well as big manufacturers like LG see them phasing out in 2018 before completely disappearing in 2020.
Similarly, audio's only going to get better and better from here on out. The iPod gave us the ability to fit thousands of songs on a 16GB device and in the time since then, memory's only gotten cheaper. We've finally reached a point where 256GB could easily fit 25,000 of your favorite songs in hi-res. And that will only happen if convenient hi-fi streaming services like Tidal and Spotify don't succeed in convincing us to stop owning music entirely.
Whether you're an A/V nut, a home entertainment enthusiast or just someone with a streaming addiction, the future for your favorite technology looks bright.
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