Who writes this

Jean-Benoit Buisson

Every page on this site is written and signed by one person. This page says who, how the judgments are reached, and — just as importantly — what he is not.

By Jean-Benoit Buisson

In brief

Jean-Benoit Buisson writes and signs every page of CinemaVerdict, from Paris, France. He is not a calibrator, an installer or an audio engineer: every figure on the site is reported from its maker with its unit and source, never derived, across 264 reviewed products.

How I got here

What made me start writing things down is the most brazen number in consumer electronics: the "lumens" on the front of a projector box. The same machine is sold as "12,000 lumens" and specified, further down, at a few hundred ANSI lumens — and both figures are on the same listing, because only one of them is measured to a standard and the other is measured to nothing. Once you notice it, the pattern is everywhere in this subject. A contrast ratio of "1,000,000:1" that is a lamp being dimmed. A soundbar rated "1,000 W" at peak. An HDMI cable sold on a version number that HDMI licensing forbids using to sell cables. Every page I found while looking for an answer had the same shape: a ranked list, a score out of ten, an affiliate button, and not one figure I could check against a specification sheet.

That is the whole subject. Home theater equipment rarely fails outright. It quietly does less than you were told, in a way nobody connects to the purchase. A projector bought for a bright living room that needed three times the light. An ultra short throw machine on a pull-down screen whose gentle ripple becomes a visible band. A "5.1 package" that turned out to be passive speakers with no amplifier. A sixteen-foot cable that drops out at 120 Hz where a six-foot one would not. None of that is on the front of the packaging, and all of it decides whether the thing does its job.

So this is the page I went looking for and never found. I read what manufacturers publish, I verify every product reference market by market, I track what this equipment actually costs — the screen, the stands, the receiver, the lamp — and I say plainly when a figure is not published at all. That last part carries more weight than it sounds: most of the disappointment in this subject comes from a number nobody printed, or from one printed in a unit that means nothing.

I keep notes — the honest specification of each family, the place where the manual contradicts the sales page, which screen suits which throw geometry, what a Dolby Atmos badge does and does not promise, and the buying mistake each category invites. This site is those notes, put in order, in five languages, because the same question is asked in French, German, Spanish and Italian and gets a far worse answer in four of them.

I am not a calibrator, an installer or an audio engineer, and I do not pretend to be. What I can do is read carefully, compare honestly, report every manufacturer figure with its unit and its source, and tell you which number the maker left out.

What this site covers

Everything listed here is taken from the catalog of this site, and each entry links to its own page. When the catalog changes, this list changes with it. It is a list of what is covered — not a list of what I own.

What I care about

Three ideas that shape every page. The number that gets quoted is usually the wrong one — a projector sold on lumens that are not ANSI lumens rather than on the throw ratio your room can hold, a soundbar sold on total watts rather than on whether it has a center channel, a subwoofer sold on peak power rather than on how low it actually reaches and at what tolerance, a cable sold on a version number rather than on a certified bandwidth. What the thing costs over three years decides more than what it costs today — a lamp is a consumable, a filter needs cleaning, a streaming box loses an app to a license change, and a speaker package that cannot grow within its range is one you replace instead of extending. And the thing that matters most is rarely on the specification sheet at all: whether the equipment is pleasant enough to use, because a projector you can hear from the sofa and a system that needs three remotes both stop being used.

What I am not

I am not a calibrator, a custom installer, an audio engineer or a projectionist. I hold no qualification in any of them, I have never worked for a manufacturer or for a retailer, and nothing here rests on any professional title. This site describes a product — its construction, its connections, its published specifications — and stops there. In particular, every brightness figure, contrast ratio, power rating, frequency response and load capacity on this site is reported from the manufacturer with its unit written as published and its source named, and never derived by me. Where a maker states 2,200 ANSI lumens or 100 W into 8 ohms at 0.08% THD, I report that the maker states it — I am not a testing laboratory, and no product here is described as brighter or louder than another on the strength of a specification alone.

And this site is emphatically not an installation manual. For anything that goes on a wall or a ceiling it points at the maker's instructions rather than paraphrasing them. It repeats one statement rather than assuming it: the load a mount states describes the mount, not your wall — a 65-inch television is 44 to 66 lb (20 to 30 kg), an arm at full extension multiplies what that does to its anchors, and brick, drywall and aerated block behave in three different ways with the same screws. If a page here touches a rule, it describes it and points to the authority or the manual that publishes it, and goes no further.

No verdict here asks for your trust on the strength of a byline; what each judgment rests on is set out on the page it appears on, and you can read how this site comes to a conclusion in full.

How I work

Every figure names its source: a manufacturer specification, a manual, a declared rating, or the Amazon.com listing quoted word for word. I do not collect or summarize buyer reviews.
No price, product reference or specification is ever invented. Where a figure is missing, the field is left empty and the gap is stated on the page.
Product references are verified against Amazon before publication, per market. Where a model is not sold in that store, you are sent to a local search rather than to a page that does not exist.
Where the cheap option wins, the page says the cheap option wins — and where the honest answer is changing a setting on the equipment you already own rather than buying something, it says that instead.
Nothing here is sold on a headline figure. No page is built around the largest number on a box, and where a product changes very little between generations, the page says so.

Why this site exists

Because home theater equipment is sold on the wrong numbers, to people furnishing a room they will sit in for years. A lumen figure with no unit is printed where an ANSI figure belongs. A dynamic contrast ratio is printed where a native one belongs. A peak wattage is printed where an RMS rating belongs. A format badge is printed where a channel notation belongs. And the parts treated as afterthoughts — the screen, the stands, the amplifier a speaker package does not include, the cable that is six feet too long — are usually what decides whether the expensive thing was worth buying.

There is also a part of this that is not about buying anything. The single most useful sentence on this site is that a declared format is a compatibility, not a capability. Writing it the other way round sells more equipment and leaves a reader disappointed by a purchase that did exactly what it promised. Plenty of what improves a room costs nothing at all: moving a subwoofer a meter and listening again, putting the soundbar below the screen instead of above it, shortening a cable run, setting a television's audio output to PCM before deciding a converter is faulty, and leaving a new pull-down screen down for a week before judging its waves. Those things are free and almost never written down. That is the subject a page full of new equipment is guaranteed to skip. It is not skipped here.

Correcting me

If something here is wrong, tell me and I will fix it and date the correction on the page. Write to [email protected].

Jean-Benoit Buisson · Paris, France