Boy did I fall down a rabbit hole this morning.

I woke up at 5:00am, couldn't get back to sleep, so I grabbed my laptop to see what was happening in the world... and ended up at the YouTube channel for a company called "Nest Box" which sells bird houses with a built-in camera. Then I watched the videos there for over a half-hour!

Here's the video which started it all, and this may very well be the most magical thing you see all week...

Amazing. If you have time to kill, I highly recommend the Nest Box Live channel.

I'd love to have one of these, but they're nearing $300. I wonder if I could build one of my own and stick one of my NestCams in it? Might be a good winter project!

I wish that my robots would keep to a routine. Joy, the mopping robot, kinda does. Carl, the vacuum robot, never does. This can cause a problem if you want vacuum then mop immediately after. If both robots are made by iRobot, then they can coordinate that stuff.

But if you don't? You either have to wait until the vacuum robot is finished then run the mopping robot.

Or else end up in this scenario, where it feels like they're about to fight to the death...

As it was, they narrowly avoided each other.

This time.

=sigh= Home robotics still has a ways to go, don't they?

A long while ago I bought a robot vacuum I named "Carl" after the janitor from The Breakfast Club. He was an imitation iRobot Roomba by Ecovacs, so he was cheap, but I didn't have a lot of furniture to confuse him or junk laying around my house to block him, so I was thrilled with how well it worked. Almost immediately I bought a companion mopping robot by iRobot that I named "Joy" after Joy Mangano (the lady who created the Miracle Mop (and was portrayed by Jennifer Lawrence in the movie biography Joy).

The mopping robot was just okay.

It worked better in my bathrooms which are smaller and easier to clean because they are tile. It worked less better in the kitchen, because it was bigger and the pad got dirty before it could finish. It didn't work AT ALL in any other spaces. Partly because they were too big... but mostly because the little vibrating pad ripped up my hideously expensive (but shoddily-made) hardwood floors. I used it for a half-year in the bathrooms, but eventually trashed it.

Fast-forward to last week after I was washing my floor on my hands and knees and thought to look at mopping robots again. The one that caught my eye was the Bissell Spinwave. The pads aren't a vibrating pad, so I had high hopes that it wouldn't tear up my shitty floors...

So I went to buy one and... FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FUCKING DOLLARS?!? Does it blow me after it finishes mopping? Because that's the only way I'd spend that kind of money.

But then I Googled to see if there was an alternative that might work for less money... only to find that Best Buy was advertising the R5 model I wanted (it has mapping on the app) for $220 (which is less than the cheaper non-R5 model!). Still more money than the $150 that I was wanting to spend, but if it works...

When I got New Joy, I set her up next to New Carl so I could charge it. Once Jake came downstairs from his nap, it took him all of seconds to see (smell?) something new...

My hopes for New Joy were dashed when it left its charging station, turned a corner around the legs of my hutch, and got stuck...

Jake found this to be hilarious...

But, seconds after I took the above photo (and before I could pull New Joy out from under the hutch), she freed herself. Nice!

Which brings us to the R5 model's mapping. The reason it's supposed to be worth the $550 price tag. It's actually very cool. The unit has a LIDAR camera spinning on top which is constantly updating it as it moves around the space. For example... this is what Joy thought my living room looked like...

But once it sees that it can go behind my couch, the map is updated to reflect that...

The mapping even noticed where "rooms" are located and decided to mop the entirety of my "great room" (living room to dining room) before moving on to the kitchen/entry hall, downstairs bathroom, and guest bedroom...

But then... uh oh. The map cleared itself shortly after entering my kitchen. Even worse, Joy stopped reporting her location accurately. She would randomly appear all over my house, but then always snap back to her actual location...

Jesus. THIS is what Bissell charges FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FUCKING DOLLARS?!?

You can define Go/No-Go areas easy enough, and your robot will remember it for any future moppings...

Unfortunately, there is a minimum size area you can define... and it's fucking HUGE. If you need tiny areas defined... like my cat feeding station and second cat water fountain... you'd better fucking hope that they are against a wall so you can have it bleed off the edge. As you can see, I got lucky.

And then we get to one of the most idiotic, head-scratching failures of this FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FUCKING DOLLAR robot... you can't define rooms/areas and save them for future use. Sure you can draw an area you want cleaned and send the robot to do that, but you can't save them for next time. They disappear after the cleaning happens...

What the fuck? It would seem that Bissell expects you to clean your entire fucking house in one go. But come on, that's not even remotely feasible. Because your little mopping pads will get dirty fairly quickly, which means it will be washing your floors with dirt. Blergh. This should be a priority for Bissell, because yikes.

When it comes to my home, I don't have tons of furniture and practically no clutter. Which makes it an excellent candidate for robots. There's hardly any obstacles for it to get caught up on. And yet... this happened...

This seemed weird. First of all because Joy was, as usual, randomly reporting herself where she wasn't located. The map was showing that she was at her docking station. But she wasn't. So I had to go looking for her. Turns out she wedged herself between the toilet and the wall...

I don't even know how to respond to this. It's not smart enough to throw itself into reverse and back out of there?

Later on I stopped hearing Joy run. At first I thought she was out of battery and couldn't return to her docking station. The map wasn't reporting her location, so off I went again to try and find her. Oh. Despite her having a FUCKING "SOFT-EDGE SENSOR" LIKE BISSELL ADVERTISES, she was choking on a rug...

Jesus. But that's not the worst of it. Do you see hoe the bed in my guest bedroom has a dust ruffle around the bottom? Joy thought it was a solid wall and didn't mop under the bed! I added a "GO" area and sent her back in the room... but she returned without mopping under the bed! So the only way to mop my guest bedroom is to remove the rugs and the dust ruffle...

So what have we got here...

• PRO: It does a good job mopping, even though you'll want to limit how much it mops to smaller areas so you can throw the mopping pads in with the wash so that you're not pushing dirt around.
• CON: Except you can't save the smaller areas you create because the app is fucking brain dead.
• PRO: The mopping pads don't rip up my expensive, shitty hardwood floors. I haven't tried the "dusting pads" but I have zero intent of ever using them, so whatever.
• CON: While the mopping is good, the vacuuming is bad. Fortunately I have a separate vacuum which does a good job, so I just run it first, but why bother with a vacuum attachment if you're not going to put a powerful enough vacuum in it to make it worth doing?
• CON: To get the LIDAR mapping capability, you have to pay FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FUCKING DOLLARS for the R5 model (or $220 if you get it on sale like I did)... and then it doesn't even report to the app reliably? It erases and can't even report the robot's location!
• CON: Apparently the robot has "soft edge" detection so it doesn't get stuck on carpets and knows when to raise the mopping pads... or whatever. But the feature is useless because the robot will choke on any carpets!
• CON: Can get stuck easily if the space is just tight enough to enter, but (apparently) not loose enough to back out of?
• PRO: The liquid cleaner reservoir is pretty big. I was able to clean my entire downstairs and never had to refill it.
• CON: The liquid cleaner reservoir is a bitch to fill. You're supposed to fill it with water to a certain level... then fill the remainder with the concentrated cleaning liquid. Except thanks to poor design, the reservoir is overflowing before you can even add the cleaner! Tragic.
• CON: The robot doesn't just "mop" in wet mode... it mops while it vacuums. But the vacuum dirt chamber is so tiny that you are pretty much forced to vacuum before you mop.
• CON: The app is awful. Fails mapping after a time, doesn't report the location of the robot accurately, doesn't save defined areas, and won't even always report when there's a problem. If Bissell is serious about staying in the robot cleaning space, they need to do a lot better than this.

Ultimately I'm going to keep New Joy because she mops just well enough that the $220 price is worth it. Had I been able to afford the original $550 price tag, she would have been boxed up and returned within one hour of opening the box.

Maybe I'm just happy that I have a solution for mopping my floors that doesn't involve me doing so on my hands and knees with a wet rag?

I dunno.

But welcome to the family, New Joy.

When I got home from work today, I was just... numb. Didn't have the energy to do anything except plop down in front of the television with an ice cream cone. Which sounds more entertaining than it was because I never bothered to actually turn the television on.

Instead I told Siri to put on some music while I caught up on the news.

And the first headline I see? FDA grants full approval to new Alzheimer's drug meant to slow disease.

Now, this is a hell of a long way from an actual cure. It costs $26,500 a year, it has been linked to death, it only slows progression for around five months, and it's more for friends and family than the person with dementia, but it's a step! And, from somebody who's intimately familiar with it... from somebody who would have given anything to have a chance at five more months with my mom where she was still mostly herself... I'd have paid the $26,500 and been grateful if it in any way helped.

And that's the way science goes.

AIDS, some cancers, and many diseases are survivable now, and it all started with a step. A step just like Leqembi is for dementia.

But there will always be those for which the science came too late.

For those left behind, I guess you just cling to the consolation that other people may be spared what you had to go through.

Maybe.

One day.

The whole "wE doN't InCludE a USB poWeR AdaPter BEcaUsE tHE enViRoNMenT aNd eVErybOdy AlReaDY haS a BunCh oF TheM" bullshit has got to stop. Nobody includes them any more and they all have this excuse. Well, my new Aqara M2 hub didn't come with a USB power adapter and I just used my last spare (off a very, very old Kindle reader!)... which means that my next device that I get I'll need to actually buy the USB power adapter. This is such crap. People should be able to request a freebie if they don't have an adapter to use. That's the only way I'll believe it's "for the environment" and not some profit margin dickery.

I don't understand people who don't find space exploration utterly fascinating.

The United Arab Emirates has a Mars probe (named Hope) that sent back one of the most amazing shots I've ever seen. It's of the moon Deimos above The Red Planet, and the image composition is so amazing that you'd think it was Photoshopped. Or CGI. Or a painting. Or anything except a photograph...

Photo from Emirates Mars Mission

The mission was originally set to end by now, but the UAE just extended it another year. The probe's wide orbit of the planet allows study of the planet and its moons in a way we haven't had before.

My fascination with Mars is directly attributed to the Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom novels...

Incredible painting by Michael Whelan shown the Martian moons of Barsoom for Thuvia, Maid of Mars

Burroughs had a fascinating take on the moons Phoebus and Deimos, which Barsoomians (AKA "Martians") call Thuria and Cluros. Because the moons are very small... just 17 miles and 9 miles across, respectively)... people shrink when they approach them. John Carter visits Thuria in the book Swords of Mars only to find the surface area was similar to that of Mars, relative to his tiny size.

Phoebus and Deimos are notable not just because they are so small, but also because their orbits are really close to Mars. Phoebus is just 5,800 miles away... Deimos 14,500. Earth's moon, for comparison is 238,900 miles! But it gets worse. Phoebos's orbit is decaying 6 feet every hundred years. Which means it's likely to break apart (Mars gets a ring!) or crash into the planet in another 50 million years.

Thanks to NASA's Perseverance rover, we actually know what a solar eclipse looks like on Mars...

I could go on for pages writing about Mars and its moons. The exploration of our neighboring planet is a fascinating subject on which there are volumes of research, photos, speculation, and fiction available. It's a bottomless pit from which I'm happy to keep falling.

UPDATE: Ironic to note that after I wrote this entry, I was watching a movie when all of a sudden my Sonos Arc soundbar made a loud POP then the sound cut out. It was seriously loud. I thought that the dresser fell over in the guest room or something. I thought it had blew out, which seemed impossible given that I didn't even have the sound up that loud, but after unplugging and plugging back in, it was find. Until it happened again! After some Googling, I found that this is a KNOWN ISSUE and Sonos hasn't done shit about it. Apparently it has to do with several audio sources, including Xbox and newer-generation AppleTV 4K. Like the one I just bought. So, yeah, not sure where I go from here. I guess I call Sonos and complain (as everybody else has done) and hope they get off their fucking asses and fix the problem. Though this has been an issue for over a year and nothing's been done, so who knows. In the meanwhile, I've gone back to my original AppleTV 4K in the hopes that the Sonos problem will abate until it's resolved. If it gets resolved.

UPDATE-UPDATE: Two days running off the old AppleTV 4K, and no pops. I switch back to the Rev. 3 AppleTV 4K and they start up again. WTF?!? I am assuming that Apple is using HDMI and Atmos standards to make their little box... so what's the deal with Sonos? Frustrating. Am I never going to be able to update my media sources now?

When it comes to the Dolby Atmos spatial audio on my Sonos Arc soundbar, I was less than impressed. Despite buying a Sonos mount, positioning the soundbar 4-inches below my television as instructed, and cranking the height channel to maximum, I just wasn't feeling it. I'd watch scene after scene of the best Atmos mixes available, confirm that Sonos was receiving Atmos sound, and never heard anything of any substance. It was a heck of a punch to the gut after paying the money it cost me.

Then Sonos released the Era 300 (which I reviewed here) and all of that was supposed to change.

And so I bought into their game, fully expecting to return the speakers when they let me down as the Sonos Arc had done.

But then they actually ended up worth being the price of admission. Once I adjusted the rear speakers to point slightly inward... increased the height volume to maximum... increased the treble by a lot... increased the bass by a bit to compensate... and increased the surround audio a touch... it all kinda came together. The only thing I could do to improve it further would be to add a wall in my open living space so that the left channel could reflect instead of drift towards my kitchen. Something that's not in the cards, alas.

But still... darn good. Mostly for spatial audio music, because the Atmos mixes we get for home video is lacking. Though the situation is improving, some movies are more impressive than others. Below is a list of my favorites. My top two are films by Denis Villeneuve, who seems to take spatial audio very seriously.

1. Blade Runner 2049 (2017 - Denis Villeneuve)
   How this movie didn't make a billion dollars is beyond me. It is an absolute masterpiece. Not only is it an impossibly good sequel to one of the most incredible films ever made... it manages to capture the atmosphere that made the original so mind-blowing. All while having a great story and flawless casting. It's a miracle on-screen. It's glorious to behold. And when it comes to the Atmos sound design? You're in the film. The many voluminous spaces fill your room with echos and reverb. Music is lush and all-encompassing. Small moments... like striking a piano key... are made to feel huge. You feel the rain falling on you in the dreary, brutalist environment of 2049's Los Angeles. Explosions rock your soul. The Atmos is meticulously crafted to be exactly what it needed to be, and makes me appreciate the movie all the more.
2. Dune (2021 - Denis Villeneuve)
   It is one of my favorite novels of all time. I've read it a dozen times. It is impossible to adapt into film. But it's been adapted twice. The 2000 TV series was a mess. I actually did enjoy the 1984 David Lynch film (which holds up very well, actually), but it was more style over substance. The Denis Villeneuve Dune, however, is genius. The writing team behind it acted like a skilled surgeon... knowing exactly what to cut while keeping the soul of the novel. And the Atmos soundscape that was crafted for the film is everything you dream about when your sound system can take advantage of it.
3. John Wick 3: Parabellum (2017 - Chad Stahelski)
   There are few franchises more deeply satisfying than everybody's favorite emo-assassin, John Wick. Each installment ups the ante in cool ways, and the brilliant Atmos soundtrack is no exception. Parabellum does an amazing job of creating immersive sound that gets better with each new movie. From rain pouring down from the sky to bullets bouncing around a room, you're there in the middle of the unrelenting action. And oh what action it is.
4. Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness (2022 - Sam Raimi)
   Disney/Marvel spends a great deal of money to make their movies a fantastic experience. But when it comes to their Atmos mixes for home video, they've been hit-or-miss... but mostly miss. You hear the film in the theater and it's great... then listen to it at home and it's kinda not. I guess the spatial audio is not a straight 1-to-1 conversion and requires work that Disney doesn't want to pay for. But it's been getting better since Avengers Infinity War & Endgame, and Multiverse of Madness is one of the best so far. The inter-dimensional jumping sounds very cool, but there's other more quiet moments with birds chirping and air moving that are just as nicely done... as it should be.
5. Avengers: Infinity War & Endgame (2018/2019 - Anthony & Joe Russo)
   The movies themselves were among the best super-hero flicks to ever be released. Smart story-telling combined with amazing special effects. And sound. You can tell that some serious money was put into the Dolby Atmos positioning, because so many scenes were beautifully mixed. And that battle at the end is where it all comes to a head.
6. Mission Impossible: Fallout (2018 - Christopher McQuarrie)
   It hadn't occurred to me to check out this movie until somebody in a Sonos forum recommended it. Very nice. There are scenes where the auditory positioning is meticulously crafted, but not in a way that sounds artificial. No easy feat.
7. John Wick 2 (2017 - Chad Stahelski)
   Unlike the consistent spatial audio in John Wick: Chapter 3, the Atmos effects are a bit more hit-or-miss with the second chapter. The ones you get are brilliant... then they just... disappear. You'll get a few scenes where obvious height queues could have been used, but weren't. It's a shame, and I'm not sure why this is. Maybe budget? In any event, the sound design is still top-notch. It just could have been more.

What surprised me most was the Atmos mixes I liked the least. I read over and over and over that my favorite movie of 2015, Mad Max: Fury Road had some of the best Atmos work to date. And yet... I was seriously underwhelmed by the overhead effects, which were so random as to be distracting (unlike John Wick 2 where you can forget about it). The height channel would pop up when it wasn't needed... then be missing when you'd expect them to be there. It's bizarre. But still an incredible movie. I just think it sounds better with a 5.1 mix.

Which is rare.

Most times, the Dolby Atmos mix is incredible... even when it's not consistent. And finally... finally... I can hear it in my home theater thanks to the Sonos Era 300's.

Building a truly great home theater is expensive. Over the years I have tried to create the best that I can afford. Which decidedly does not involve building a custom theater room. I just do the best I can with my living room. That, paired with the fact that electronics tend to get cheaper over time, has helped.

My sound recently got a major upgrade with a pair of Sonos Era 300's. Their ability to render a pretty good height channel for Dolby Atmos out of my Sonos Arc may not be as incredible as actual dedicated height speakers, but it's cheaper than ripping apart my walls to wire them in.

I wanted a cool $3,000 OLED TV when my old TV died, but that's way, way out of my budget. Instead I bought a mid-range Sony 65" KD65X80J for $780 on sale. It's far from perfect, but it has decent brightness, HDR color fidelity to display DolbyVision, and can pass-through Dolby Atmos sound. Which makes it worth paying $300 more than a cheaper model (until I check my wallet... then I'm all "What was I thinking?").

Which left me to my media source.

Early streaming efforts were pretty crappy. Color fidelity was awful. Motion artifacts were terrible. And resolution was abysmal. So I invested in a Samsung Blu-Ray 4K UHD player. The picture quality was outstanding. So sharp and saturated. But I could never get the advanced audio to work. Sonos couldn't handle DTS, it can only process Dolby Atmos. But some discs only came with DTS, which meant that I had to rely on conversion by other components, which usually didn't work and got me Dolby 5.1 instead. Rather than wasting money on Blu-ray Discs that may or may not give me the audio I was paying for, I abandoned it. And was thrilled about it, since most discs had a STOP PIRACY warning which you were forced to look at and couldn't fast-forward past (which is fucking stupid... I bought your fucking disc, didn't I?).

Then Apple came out with AppleTV 4K. It could stream much, much better quality 4K video in full HDR10 DolbyVision color, complete with Dolby Atmos. Which is to say that every movie I purchase from the iTunes Store which supported spatial audio would be in Dolby Atmos format for my Sonos system. Yay. When comparing the two visually and audibly, it's darn close to Blu-Ray UHD video quality. The only time I could tell was if I paused the video and compared it frame-by-frame. And so I started buying all my movies digitally, which is cheaper and easier than Blu-Ray anyway. Even if it does mean that I'm always under threat of the stuff I buy getting jerked from the iTunes Store and having nothing to show for it (which should be illegal... at the very least I should get my money back). It's a pity that the user interface for AppleTV continues to be incomprehensibly shitty, but I guess nothing is perfect.

So now I only use my Blu-Ray player for old movies that I am not able to re-purchase as digital, and it's not worth the hard drive space to rip them.

As for DolbyVision? Here are some of my favorites which are taking advantage of the HDR color gamut and video quality...

1. Bullet Train (2022 - David Leitch)
   When it comes to all the benefits that DolbyVision offers, few movies come as close to perfection as Bullet Train. From the incredible colorscapes of Tokyo to the vivid lighting on the train in question, there's some real visual magic happening here.
2. Atomic Blonde (2017 - David Leitch)
   Two strange things on this phenomenal Charlize Theron flick. 1) Though the video is in glorious DolbyVision, the sound is not in Dolby Atmos... which is bizarre. 2) When I went to add it to my list and look up the director, I had no idea that it would be the same guy that did Bullet Train! David Leitch very obviously knows how to use the extended gamut in his work. And with Atomic Blonde, he used it to beautiful effect. Most of the film is rendered in cold blues and greens and the HDR allows that to happen while still allowing very good definition. And when warm colors pop up, they add a remarkable contrast that really sets the scene on fire. I just don't understand why we didn't get Atmos, which would be amazing.
3. Pixels (2015 - Chris Columbus)
   About half-way through the movie when the aliens invade, their hyper-saturated pixel forms are so beautifully saturated against the backdrop of the real-world that it kinda messes with your head. But in a cool way. It's a surprisingly effecting use of HDR which turns a mediocre movie into something beautiful to look at.
4. John Wick 2 & 3 (2017 & 2019 - Chad Stahelski)
   David Leitch, who directed the first two movies on my list, is executive producer on the Wick franchise. Whether it's a coincidence that the colors on these film is also fantastic I don't know. But it's an interesting thing to note given how fantastic these films look in DolbyVision.
5. Avatar: The Way of Water (2022 - James Cameron)
   Look, the color in this movie is incredible, as you would expect from something that's artificially rendered. They can make every last object whatever color they want... however saturated they want. They can add glows or artificial lighting... it's all on the table. So, yeah, in DolbyVision this is phenomenal. And if I had an OLED television, it would be fucking mind-blowing. But it's a video game. It's a cartoon. It's not real. You cannot compare it to actual movies in the Real World. Because even if the Real World footage has been color-graded and processed, it's still... real. And yet... if you want to see stunning visuals unlike anything else, here's your movie.
6. The LEGO Batman Movie (2017 - Chris McKay)
   I actually had to watch this in DolbyVision... and without DolbyVision... at the same time to see if what I was seeing wasn't my imagination. I couldn't tell if my mind was filling in the blanks or if the depth and detail I was seeing was actually there. And it is. They use color like a bomb in most every scene, exploding it over everything. But not in a bad way. In a beautiful, lush way that's just there.
7. Any Disney/Pixar Film Using DolbyVision
   Animation, with its rich, saturated colors, should be the perfect way to showcase DolbyVision. And, for the most part, it is. Movies like The Incredibles 2 and Monsters Inc. look fantastic in an HDR colorspace.
8. Blade Runner 2049
   This movie has some incredibly saturated visuals that look amazing in HDR. But DolbyVision is more than just pretty, saturated colors. It's also about having very well-defined details in the shadows... and making sure that there's definition when the color pallet is washed out. In that respect, Blade Runner 2049 is absolutely stunning.

The point of this post is in the title... AppleTV is shit. But it's the best shit you can buy for streaming.

I'm not going to run through my many complaints. If you've read this blog for any amount of time, you've probably already heard it all. If you haven't heard it? The GUI (graphic user interface) is fucking horrendous. If you own more than twenty movies or television shows, scrolling through all of them is a nightmare. Apple provides no alphabetical index on the side so you can at least jump to the first letter of the title you're looking for. It's fucking stupid.

But anyway...

Since the quality of the picture is so radically better when viewed through the AppleTV device instead of the GoogleTV app for AppleTV, I decided to ditch my AppleTV 4K (2017 Revision 1) for the newer AppleTV 4K (2022 Revision 3). And because I want to be sure that I get the smoothest possible playback, I purchased the "better" version which has Ethernet and 128GB.

The difference between Rev. 1 and Rev. 3 are slight at the start. Both support 4K DolbyVision HDR10 UHD playback. Both support Dolby Atmos. You have to pay extra for Ethernet now, but my Rev. 1 had Ethernet as standard. But then there's the improvements which really count... my old AppleTV was a slow mess with its A10X chip. It's radically snappier with the new A15 Bionic chip. I'm also working with the 128GB vs. the 32GB I used to have. And then there's the fact that Apple finally future-proofed their tech by using the HDMI 2.1 standard instead of the old 2.0. I am using Ethernet instead of WiFi, but if I were to use wireless, the new model comes with WiFi 6. The new one is also smaller and feels lighter than the old one too. As if all that wasn't enough, it contains a Thread mesh networking radio to become a border router for your HomeKit shenanigans and Matter Smart Home devices.

But the most welcome change? The controller...

Apple ditched their shitty fucking touchpad controller for a new controller that has a good heft and actual directional buttons. Which means that navigation doesn't randomly jump all over the place like it used to. I have no idea why it took them this long to replace that technology FAIL. But look how long it took them to replace their heinously shitty "butterfly keyboard" on their laptops. And... oh yeah... you can charge with USB-C instead of the ten-year-old Lightning connector that nobody else in the industry is using. Yay. Alas no charging indicator... you have to look up the battery level on your AppleTV.

The navigation buttons surround a select button to form a "clickpad" that's also touch-enabled, which is very cool for whizzing through video. You also have a dedicated power button(!) and a mute button(!). It almost as if Apple is listening to what their customers want! Color me shocked. Regardless of why they did it, Apple has gone from my most hated remote ever to my favorite remote ever.

I dare say that the remote upgrade is reason enough to upgrade. Mostly because I am actually using it instead of avoiding it and using a 3rd party remote.

When compared to Amazon FireTV, Google Chromecast, and Roku, AppleTV is way ahead (except for the navigation GUI, which is still the absolute worst). The only competitor they have in this space is probably the NVIDIA Shield, which offers more flexibility and connectivity, but looks like absolute ass. I borrowed one from a friend who tested it and ended up preferring it to my old AppleTV, but not the new AppleTV Rev. 3.

So... yeah... my home theater setup is now complete.

Over the next couple of days I'll be talking about the DolbyVision and Dolby Atmos that I'm getting through my AppleTV box. If that's not for you... then I guess I'll see you on Thursday!

I have a love/hate relationship with Sonos Home Audio.

On one hand, they are very good speakers. The sound I get from a single Sonos One (the cheapest, smallest speaker in their lineup) is better than I get from the speakers on my pricey Sony television. Sonos speakers are very well balanced to handle just about everything. Music sounds just as good as audiobooks which sounds as good as TV shows and movies.

But on the other hand, Sonos can be incredibly frustrating. When I replaced my Sonos PlayBar with a Sonos Arc, I spent a full hour talking with their support to get everything working. It was supposed to be an easy, no-brainer task, but it sure didn't end up that way for me. And then there's weird networking drop-outs that happen at random and can be a real bitch to resolve considering the only thing I ever get told is "IT'S BECAUSE YOUR WI-FI NETWORK SUCKS!!!" (as if I have some kind of cheap-ass Wi-Fi router buried in the basement instead of dual AmpliFi Alien routers in a mesh network that blankets my home with perfect Wi-Fi).

In the end I am happy enough with Sonos to ignore its shortcomings (no line-in is fucking stupid on a level of fucking stupid that has me reconsidering what I consider to be fucking stupid given how expensive their speakers are... and don't get me started on not being able to use dedicated left and right channels for surround sound). I have quite a few of their products collected from Black Friday sales over the years, and most rooms in my house are covered with Sonos sound. Heck, I even have Sonos in the bathrooms so I don't have to miss what's happening on my television shows when I have to get up and go pee.

And then Sonos decided to get cute and offer a new line of "Era" speakers. The Era 100, which takes the place of their entry-level Sonos One speaker... and the Era 300, which takes the place of their long-abandoned Play 3 speaker.

At first I was going to safely ignore their new offerings because I have neither the money nor the desire to expand upon my speaker collection.

But then I learned that the Era 300 is designed from the bottom up to support Dolby Atmos and I was intrigued. Dolby Atmos allows precise sound placement within a room. This is usually reserved for theaters which can install speakers all the way around the seating area... along with the ceiling... so that the action can move around the room to match what you are seeing. It's a pretty nifty trick. The technology is something that is supposed to be supported by my Sonos Arc soundbar, but the effect is minimal to the point that it might as well not even exist at all.

The Sonos Era 300 has an up-firing speaker that looked substantial enough to actually maybe kinda support actual Atmos sound bouncing down on your from above...

So I used my final two Sonos upgrade credits and all the Black Friday money I had left after buying Neon Bad Monkey and pre-ordered a pair of them.

And now they're here.

And I'm just going to cut to the chase here. They are... pretty good.

Because whether or not you have great Atmos sound largely depends on the audio mix that movie and television studios add to their products. I've tested these speakers for hours with all kinds of movies available in Dolby Atmos, and it's very rare that I find myself going "Whoa!" because some sound playing above me was distinct enough to catch me by surprise. No, for the most part, you're largely just getting a better, fuller surround sound experience. Back-To-Front and Front-To-Back audio is far more distinct with those up-firing speakers because you can feel the "movement" better. Far better than I did with my Sonos Ones as rear speakers. For that reason alone I am quite happy with my purchase. And who knows? Maybe as more and more people have Dolby Atmos available at home, studios will start doing better mixing so that my speakers can take advantage of it.

Now lets get to the Dolby Atmos experience that's truly worth it... Atmos Music!

I tell you what... I had read that Apple was partnering with Sonos so that their spatial audio tracks would play on Sonos hardware... but I wasn't thinking of that when I fired up some music to see if it sounded good from the 300s. A couple tracks played and I was suitably impressed.

Then the song If You're Too Shy (Let Me Know) by The 1975 dropped and I thought I was hallucinating. Lead singer Matt Healy's vocals were IN FRONT OF the music. And acoustical queues were all over the room. If I closed my eyes, it was as if The 1975 were set up in my living room. Then I remembered about the Apple Music Atmos thing and, sure enough...

For many Dolby Atmos music tracks, what you hear is flat-out mind-blowing. The 1975 remixed all their stuff, and (for the most part) it's incredible. Some songs are more experimental than others. Some songs push it too far to the point of distraction. But most of the songs are perfectly rendered in a way that makes the whole experience... maybe not better... but perhaps nicely different.

All of a sudden I was scouring all my favorite tracks to see if they had Atmos mixes available.

And it was like discovering music all over again.

Yes, there are instances where the Atmos is a gimmick that doesn't work. But for others? It runs the gamut. The biggest surprise was Kacey Musgraves Golden Hour. Whomever came up with her mixes just knocked it out of the park (with a couple notable exceptions which are gimmicky as hell). It. Is. Sublime. In Oh, What a World when that banjo hits, I had chills running up my spine. It's a fantastic experience. My favorite Post Malone tracks were wonderfully mixed for spatial audio. The newest Taylor Swift album is beautiful. And some bands you just know were hopping on the bandwagon early with Atmos remixes... like ODESZA. The track they did with Namoi Wild, Higher Ground, feels like her vocals are ON TOP OF the music. Or something. I can't even begin to explain it. But it's fantastic. Of course, it was a great track even before spatial audio...

The highest praise I can offer for spatial audio and Dolby Atmos music is that, when mixed right, the vocals never get lost in the music. They are always distinct and rendered front-and-center. One of the best songs to hear this is with Miley Cyrus's Flowers. There's places that she harmonizes with herself. But when listening to it without Atmos, the voices blend together. With Atmos, however, the harmonizing backing vocals are... like... elsewhere. They don't merge or compete... they're just another part of the music. I don't know quite how to explain it. But once I hear the difference... then go back to regular stereo... I can no longer un-hear it because the Atmos version feels like it's the way you're supposed to be hearing it.

So... probably not returning my pair of 300s... even though there's some bullshit right out of the gate.

First of all, Sonos finally... FINALLY... added bluetooth and line-in to their speakers. But when you configure them to be part of a Dolby Atmos setup... YOU NO LONGER CAN USE THEM FOR EITHER! WHAT THE BLOODY FUCK, SONOS??

When that message popped up, it was all I could do to keep from throwing my phone against the wall. I was more than a little upset... I was fucking pissed.

I'm sure that Sonos will come up with some kind of bullshit excuse to explain it away, but the simple fact is that you could easily... easily... just have the speaker ignore all other input once the line-in is receiving input. This is not fucking rocket science. The fact that I can't just plug into one of my pricey new speakers with a frickin' line-in is so far beyond rage-inducing that I honestly don't know what to do with my anger from it.

But at least there's the option for a line-in... AT ALL.

If I were flush with cash I'd likely buy a single Sonos Era 300 for my bedroom and run a line from my television. That way I could have darn good TV sound along with a kick-ass speaker for music (the stereo separation from a single 300 is surprisingly good).

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!

Assuming I win the lottery tomorrow, it's not enough to just buy a $450 Sonos Era 300 speaker for my television. YOU ALSO HAVE TO BUY A FUCKING $20 MINI-PLUG DONGLE! It's like... holy shit. There's fleecing your customers, and then there's Sonos fucking gouging their customers. This is pretty disgraceful.

So... to summarize in bullet points...

• Setup actually worked like it was supposed to this time. I had an immediate software update I had to send to the Era 300's, but I was up and running in minutes.
• I love that the power cord plug is smaller now. My rear speakers are on a slim shelf that I drilled holes in so the cords are hidden. But the Sonos Ones had a big-ass plug which meant I had to use a metal rod to smash it through the hole. The new Era plugs are more compact and just pop through. Easy!
• I've had mixed results with Sonos TruePlay tuning (where you walk around the room waving your phone around while the Sonos app listens to tones and calibrates the speakers so their sound is best rendered in your room). The first time I tried it years ago, I loved it. Then the last couple times I thought the calibration was pretty bad and removed it. This time the jury is still out. I think it made my Atmos music sound better... but the movies I tried after calibration didn't sound as bright and the overhead sound was muted. I'll probably keep TruePlay on but fine-tune the EQ and upward sound levels.
• The line-in garbage mentioned above is fucking bullshit. I am outraged that not only is it fully disabled when you use them as surrounds... but you also have to buy a fucking dongle. It's as if Sonos said "WELL, YOU WANTED A LINE-IN, SO HERE IT IS... TOO BAD WE FUCKING BROKE IT!
• Until more studios really invest in doing Dolby Atmos mixes that are killer, I wouldn't buy these speakers just for movies with Dolby Atmos. It's just not a big enough upgrade given how many mediocre mixes are out there claiming to be "Atmos."
• The "killer app" on the Era 300s is Dolby Atmos music. Spatial audio provides an experience I haven't heard before and, for the most part, I absolutely love it. As more and more artists go back and remix their music (or remix the mixes that aren't that great) I think this is reason enough to give them a listen and see what you think.
• Yes, the price of Sonos gear is as heinous as it ever was. About the only justification I can offer is that they feel quality. They are noticeably heavy and seem built to last. And, needless to say, the sound quality is darn good given the size. Exceptional even. I have never had a complaint about the sound I get... and even a meager little Sonos One provides a great experience. Sonos is one of those companies where I think the cost is likely worth it. That being said, every piece of my Sonos gear was bought on sale because... damn.
• All my stuff was purchased directly from Sonos because I like that they offer a money-back-guarantee when you purchase from them. It's the least they can do given how much money it costs. If you are on the fence, it's worth investigating whether the shop you're buying from can offer a guarantee. Pretty sure not all of them do.
• If you are a long-time Sonos customer, Sonos will give you "upgrade credits" which knock 15% off the price of their wares. For every speaker you own that's old enough to earn a discount, you get one credit to use on another speaker to replace it. Except you don't have to return your old speaker... you get to keep it! If you registered your products with Sonos, be sure to look at your account and see what's available. I saved nearly $70 each on the 300s, which is serious money.
• A lot has been said about how "ugly" the Sonos 300s are. Personally, I'm not seeing it. I am very sensitive to design aesthetics and actually really like the look of them. When sitting on the shelf behind my couch, they look nice from any angle and have an impressive heft to them that makes me confident a cat isn't going to knock them off (if they were to ever climb up on those shelves, which they rarely do).
• I did not buy any Era 100s and really have no plan to do so. The improvement over my Sonos Ones seems minimal, as there's no up-firing speakers for rendering Atmos. The stereo separate looks like it might be pretty good... but since the speaker is so narrow, I'm not sure how noticeable it would be.

And there you have it.

If you've got a showroom somewhere near you with Sonos gear, it might be worth a look if you're thinking about investing in new speakers.