Authors
The writers behind AVpicks. Each person owns a domain, from the gear they test to the criteria they use. Here is where they come from, why they cover it, and how they work.
Camila Reyes
Audio and speakers
Austin, Texas · testing since 2016
Camila has rearranged her living room more times than she can count, all in the name of getting dialogue out of the center of the screen. She tests audio by episode, not by spec sheet, because a bar that wins one scene loses the next.
Background
The TV in Camila's San Antonio childhood home was always on, and all of it came through one tinny speaker on the set. She worked four years at an Austin electronics store selling soundbars to people who mostly wanted the dialogue to be intelligible. In 2016 she bought a used five-channel receiver and a single bookshelf speaker and started measuring her own room.
Tape marks on the floor of Camila's rented 1940s bungalow show where speakers have lived. The living room has plaster walls, a shared wall with a neighbor, and one good corner for a sub. A UMIK-1 microphone and a laptop sit in a drawer, and a folded moving blanket hides behind the couch for when a bass note rattles the neighbor's wall.
Why I got into it
Selling soundbars taught her that room size decides more than price, since a bar that fills a store demo room can sound thin six feet from a bedroom wall. The store demo never matched her apartment, so she bought a measurement mic and started plotting response curves at home. Her reviews answer the question she got in the store: will this work in the room I actually have?
How I review
Two weeks in her living room, not a demo bench, is where a soundbar or speaker pair proves itself. She runs the same test scenes, checks dialogue at low volume, measures bass output with the mic, and notes the setting where the sub starts to smear. Room correction modes get compared on and off, because most buyers leave them on.
The tiebreaker is voice intelligibility in a quiet room at night, since a bar that only sounds big and loud gets turned into a subtitle machine. She says who should skip a sub, which is anyone in an apartment with a neighbor below, and which bars are enough on their own. Gear that needs a second remote or a fiddly app loses points.
Home audio tester and former electronics store salesperson who tunes soundbars, subs, and surround systems in real apartments and houses, measuring dialogue clarity, bass output, and room fit.
Domain: audio · soundbars · subwoofers · room-fit
Focus: dialogue clarity · subwoofer placement · room size · bass control · wireless surround
Derek Osborne
Home theater setup
Portland, Oregon · testing since 2014
Derek has patched more drywall than most people have hung pictures, and he measures viewing height before he measures a TV. His setup guides start with the wall, because the wrong wall ruins the best screen.
Background
The summer Derek helped his father rewire a Salem, Oregon rental house taught him which breaker not to trust. He spent five years as a low-voltage installer, running cable through attics and fishing HDMI behind baseboards for a small Portland shop. In 2014 he mounted his first TV on a plaster wall with 1950s lath behind it. The mount held, but the wall needed three anchors.
A shoebox of leftover bolts, spacers, and drywall anchors sits in the closet of the 1920s Portland foursquare where Derek rents the top floor. Every wall is plaster, so he owns a stud finder with a deep-scan mode and a fish tape he has used in four apartments. The couch faces the only wall long enough for a 65-inch screen, which settles most arguments early.
Why I got into it
Cable work taught him that a clean install is mostly planning, and the TV is the easy part. Renters kept asking how to hang a screen without losing a deposit, and the big-box instructions never mentioned plaster or lath. He started writing install guides that name the wall type, the anchor, and the drill bit before the first hole.
How I review
Mounts and cables get installed for real here, on drywall, plaster, brick, and a rented wall he has to leave intact. He checks how level the bracket sits, whether the TV can be pulled out and pushed flat, and whether the plate passes a 4K signal at 60Hz without dropping to black for a second. He logs the tools and the time.
The tiebreaker is the second install, because hardware that fights you once will fight you again when you move. He tells renters which mounts use existing holes and which TVs need two people. Receivers that drop HDMI handshakes after a source switch get flagged, since that is the failure that makes a whole setup feel broken.
Low-voltage installer turned home theater DIY tester who has mounted TVs and wired receivers across brick, drywall, and plaster rentals, tracking anchor choice, cable runs, and HDMI stability.
Domain: setup · mounts · cables · components
Focus: mount hardware · cable routing · HDMI bandwidth · viewing height · rental-friendly installs
Noah Feldman
TVs and projectors
Denver, Colorado · testing since 2015
Noah has watched the same movie in four rooms to see how the picture holds up, because a TV that wins a dark showroom can lose to a sunny Sunday. He tests screens in daylight first and black levels second.
Background
Two summers running the booth at a two-screen Denver movie theater taught Noah why a dirty port glass softens everything on screen. He grew up in Colorado Springs, then worked eight years at a video production company editing corporate footage on a calibrated monitor. In 2015 he bought a 1080p projector for a south-facing living room and learned that lumens on the box say little about 3 p.m.
His living room has two windows facing south and a wall of shelving that bounces light onto the screen. A light meter and a tape measure live in the coffee table drawer, and a blackout curtain gets pulled for movie nights but not for a Sunday afternoon game. He still keeps a binder of color settings for every display that has passed through.
Why I got into it
Editing on a calibrated monitor taught him to notice a bad black level or a crushed shadow, and a home TV rarely arrives calibrated. He got tired of showroom floors where every screen looked fine under stage lighting. His reviews report what a display does in a normal room with a lamp on, at night, and over a weekend of sports and games.
How I review
A full week in his living room, watched in daylight, at night, and with one lamp on, is the bar for a TV or projector. He measures brightness with a meter, times input lag on a fighting game, and checks for blooming around subtitles. Motion gets judged on a hockey game, because panning across ice exposes blur faster than a movie does.
The tiebreaker is the room, not the panel, since a bright-room TV that washes out at noon is useless on a sunny wall. He says who should skip OLED in a bright room and who should skip a projector without light control, and he names the seating distance a size actually suits. Reflections stay in the notes, because glare is what most people notice first.
Former movie theater booth operator and video editor turned TV and projector tester, judging bright-room contrast, motion, input lag, and viewing distance in a real living room.
Domain: tvs · projectors · bright-rooms · gaming
Focus: bright-room contrast · motion handling · projector lumens · gaming input lag · viewing distance