Education & Books

If you're fairly new to the world of HDTV, one word you've probably heard a few times is 'compression.' Typically it's used in a very negative way, taking the blame for all sorts of picture quality issues. Unfortunately, compression gets a bad wrap most of the time, in fact, compression itself is really a great thing. In a nutshell, compression is exactly what it sounds like: taking something big and making it smaller, compressing it down to a smaller size. It's the thing that allows a full HDTV movie to fit on a Blu-ray disk, or for an HDTV program to be broadcast to your home for your viewing pleasure. Uncompressed high definition content is simply too large to be of any use to us consumers. Compression is the thing that allows you to store and transfer audio and video content that otherwise would be way too big.

Think of a beach ball...

So you went out and bought yourself a new HDTV. Many of you bought a sound system to go with it. Now you are inundated with all kinds of terms and acronyms. In this series we will go through the jargon associated with your new system. While these articles are aimed at newbies, some experienced readers out there may learn a thing or two as well. Today we start with two topics that come up on our podcast (HDTV and Home Theater Podcast) quite frequently....