The Curved Monitor Conspiracy Theory Solved Once and For All

By no means am I a conspiracy theory guy, although I know a few people who are still, to this day, susceptible to that level of non-factual garbage. Back in April, I was sitting on a pretty sizeable credit on American Airlines that they adamantly refused to allow me to transfer or to delay any longer. Respectfully, I wasn’t that excited about flying yet, but the idea of losing almost $1,300 for nothing was perhaps worse than my then-COVID anxiety. I decided to look into which Golf Magazine Top 100 (United States list) courses that were a) highly ranked and b) located in a city that I could play one course and be done, thus not leaving any nearby Top 100s on the list that require another trip, thus time, money, and effort. I made that mistake in the past by not playing Double Eagle in Columbus, Ohio, so I need to go back hopefully to see a Blue Jackets game. I would not make that mistake again, so I therefore did a little pre-trip preparation. The conclusion that I came to was to play Southern Hills in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was to host the PGA Championship in a mere 40 days that May 2022.

When I got to Tulsa, with my dear friend Lon as my golf companion, we got off of the plane and collected our bags and clubs and beckoned an Uber Black via my iPhone. We ventured into the icy cold wind of April in Oklahoma and waited for our chariot. What we got was literally a crew cab pickup truck. That’s Uber Black? I am thinking. Remarkable. Our clubs and bags were less than carefully thrown in the back of the truck as we loaded our fine asses inside and headed to our Indian casino home-away-from home. The first thing out of the driver’s mouth to us was, “I wasn’t gonna pick up you two coastal-intellectual, Hunter-Biden-lovin’ liberals from Los Angeles. The other two Uber drivers weren’t going to pick you up. So…” 

I could see that this trip was going to hell in a handbasket (and fast), but I couldn’t resist upping the rhetoric, as I am a glutton for punishment. We were cruising at a pretty fast clip on the freeway en route to that newly built but poorly run (by Vegas or even Atlantic City standards) Indian casino near Southern Hills Golf Course. In a burst of Californian-liberal Tourette’s Syndrome I asked, “I assume you are a friend of Q [meaning the moronic, right-wing conspiracy theory group that has strong ties to the MAGA movement and former president Trump who lost the 2020 election by the same electoral count as Mrs. Clinton in 2016, as well as 64 lawsuits designed to overturn the outcome of the 2022 elections]?” He agreed. So, I continued my questioning, despite the laser-beam look I was getting from my 180 IQ Mensa International-member friend. “So, you know about Hillary and the kids in the basement, right?” He approvingly agreed and nodded, so that I could see him through the rear-view mirror. “Do you remember the movie Pee Wee’s Big Adventure?” I quipped. “No, but remind me,” he said in his heavy Southern accent. So, I tell him the basic gist of the film, “Pee Wee [our hero] gets his beloved bike stolen and finds out that it is being stored in the basement of The Alamo in Texas. The film quickly transforms into a travel-buddy movie until they get to The Alamo and realize that THERE IS NO BASEMENT in The Alamo.” He asked, “What’s the point?” with a kinder-than-normal tone to his voice. I retorted, “You know there’s no basement at the vegan pizza place in Washington D.C. where Hillary was supposedly sex-trafficking children, right?” And you could see his blood boiling in the veins of his neck, paired with the abject fear in the eyes of my 62-year-old golf buddy, Lon. I was simply asking for trouble, but couldn’t help myself. Thankfully, we were close enough to the casino that he didn’t just dump us off on the side of the freeway, thus making us liberal, California-elite hitchhikers. We pulled up to the check-in area of the newly built and gleaming casino, and I asked him, “Would you mind if I paid you in cash?”, and he told me that the ride was going to be $100. Lon couldn’t get out of the car fast enough to stand on the curb watching our last interaction. I handed the driver a $100 bill from my wallet and then gave him an additional $50 bill as a gratuity. Now, Lon was either aghast or enraged as, while quite well off, Lon doesn’t tip like he’s Al Czervik from Caddyshack, but I often do (and in this case, to prove a point). I’ve been told in the past that I would tip a toll both attendant if allowable. The driver lit up with joy at his highly unexpected financial windfall. He reached into his pocket (not to pull his firearm, thankfully) to retrieve one of his business cards. He nervously yet enthusiastically told me, “If, if, if you need to go anywhere on your trip … you call ME. Okay?” as he handed me the card. I smiled, thanked him for the ride and headed into the casino check-in.  

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While waiting in a longer-than-reasonable check-in line at the casino, I had time to explain my conspiracy theory social experiment. It didn’t take Lon long to figure out what I had done, although we both were convinced that the driver somehow hadn’t picked up what I was putting down (cue the Rick Astley song because somebody got Rick-rolled in the Tulsa Uber driver pool).

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Sadly, in the world of “fly-over states,” as well as in the audiophile hobby – anti-fact, anti-science biases run wild in 2022. The idea that $35,000 EQed speaker cables are the key to audiophile nirvana is simply garbage in a technological world, where we have real-world digital room correction. The idea that little stacks of polished wood discs (that cost a fortune per unit) can repair large-scale, physical acoustical issues is even more absurd. The concept of painting the edges of your Compact Disc green is nothing short of a good way to ruin a good part of your musical software collection. Propping your speaker cables a few inches above the floor accomplishes nothing, other than humiliating yourself in front of anybody who knows that “de-coupling” your highly insulated speaker cables has no audible positive outcome other than “placebo effect.” Yet, many in the audiophile hobby want to believe what they want to believe, despite the facts or science, just like our friends on both sides of the extreme political spectrum. This needs to change – and fast.

So, what does this have to do with home theater and video? (Allow me to explain …)

With that prolonged story from my recent past told, I think I figured out one of my long-standing questions about an actual video conspiracy theory of my own. Let’s get to the pizza-shop bottom of this one. Remember the first time that you saw a curved HDTV? It was around the time when 4K resolutions were making their way to market. Our beloved, inky-black plasmas were on the way out, because they simply couldn’t support 4K resolutions. In were these curved HDTVs that peeled up from the wall looking like a bad bit of wallpapering – not the thinner-and-thinner “flat, picture-like HDTVs” that we had immediately fallen in love with back in the 2000s … long before flat TVs could even reproduce HD-level resolutions.

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why these video monitors were physically curved. What advantage did these curves bring to the viewing experience? I just couldn’t see it, nor could I understand it. Did the curves help with the nobody-wants-this-trick-but-it-is-a-recession-so-why-not-try-something-new 3D technology back in the late 2000s? Perhaps the marketing people in Japan and Korea thought American buyers were too stupid to know the difference between 4K and 1080P without a notable physical difference like a curved screen? None of my video experts at my former home theater publication thought 3D was anything but WORSE on a curved TV. Frankly, it made a few of us literally nauseated, and we refused to watch or review said 3D sets. Consumers, especially in North America, hated curved HDTVs, and that showed with their spending habits. We wanted paper-thin, non-3D HDTV sets that were bigger, brighter, more resolute, and with deep, rich black levels like we got from our recently departed friend, plasma TV.

When Curved Monitors Makes Sense

It took a few years, but the consumer electronics industry got the message on curved HDTVs, as I haven’t seen one on sale for years and years. That is excluding the world of computer monitors, and this possibly ends the curved question for me. I got a curved, 4K LG computer monitor to go with my 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro that I spend most of my days on. Finally, I found where a curved video screen makes sense. This massive 49-inch, near-field 4K computer monitor is an absolute revelation. I cannot overstate how greatly my workflow has improved. The screen is so wide that you have to literally scroll FOUR TIMES to get from one corner to another on the screen. It is joyous. The colors are bright. It's like having a crystal-clear window on the internet. The 49 inches (who says size doesn’t matter) of screen width allows me to have FOUR full-sized windows open at the same time. It is tantamount to having a much larger desk to spread out your paperwork. In the end, it is the curve that brings everything in together a little bit more. Finally, a curved monitor makes sense. My wife has a 32-inch screen and loves it. My SEO friend in the U.K. just got a monitor like my wife’s, and he’s over the moon about his curved 4K screen, even though it was only a few hundred bucks, all-in. His workflow is better. Hell, even my favorite Doug Demuro exotic car YouTube.com videos look better on my curve 49-inch screen. The curved screen mystery has finally been solved!

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The future of the audiophile and home theater hobby is not based on believing in technological voodoo. The future isn’t based on anti-science hyperbole. The future of AV doesn’t require Powerball-winnings levels of investment. It doesn’t require you to believe in bullshit AV conspiracy theories. Music, movies and today’s fantastic television, be it streaming, cable or network, makes for great content. Enjoying fantastic content is what the hobby is all about – not esoterica and nonsense. End of sermon.