Yes, all of us chattering classes spent the weekend, um, chattering about Radiohead's shocker, but this article in <I>The Telegraph</I> may be the best I've seen. Its yearly sales breakdown and record company revenues charts provide some historical context.
Louis Armstrong's last LP was contemporary country music, He was asked if he was making a statement by recording what was then considered white, working class music. Silly question—Armstrong recorded with Jimmie Rodgers, after all.
Simaudio's Moon LP5.3 MM/MC phono preamplifier ($1400) is silly good! It has single-ended RCA inputs and both single-ended and true balanced-differential outputs. It also offers a wide range of adjustments for gain (54, 60, and 66dB), resistive loading (10, 100, 470, 1k, and 47k ohms), and capacitive loading (0, 100, and 470pF), all accomplished via a series of internally mounted jumper banks. You can even choose RIAA or IEC equalization. Removing the top plate to get to the adjustments reveals boards filled with high-quality parts for the well-isolated power-supply and signal-handling circuits.
When I say that this past—and <I>last</I>—Summer CES in Chicago was dead daddy dead, I'm not talking about fewer high-end exhibits and attendees than ever before. I'm talking I walked in the front door of the Chicago Hilton and almost puked from that smell of dead, mealy meat that hits you in the face and kicks-in the gag reflex. The smell of death you can taste even if you're breathing with your mouth. In most religions, it's a sin to let something that dead just sit there without at least spreading some lye on it to kill the stink. I once cut a man for misadjusting the VTA on my cartridge, and that man lying on my listening-room floor with an Allen wrench still clenched in his hand wasn't as dead as this last SCES.
Since he joined Snell Acoustics in the mid-1980s, Kevin Voecks, their chief designer (footnote 1), has been involved in the design or redesign of the entire Snell line, from the minor revision of the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/378snell">Type A/III</A> (incorporation of a new tweeter), to the complete redesign of the Type C (now the CIII). Snell Acoustics is located in Massachusetts, and although Kevin spends a good deal of time there or at the measurement and analysis facilities of the Canadian National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa, he does a great deal of his conceptual and preliminary design work, as well as his listening, in Los Angeles, where he makes his home. I visited him there last summer to gather a little insight into his background and loudspeaker design philosophy. I started by asking Kevin when had he first become interested in loudspeaker design...
"Tomorrow we'll go over to <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/593">Larry Archibald</A>'s house and pick up the Threshold amplifiers."
iTunes continues to flourish, the major labels have been struggling to reinvent themselves, and CD sales keep stalling. What do you think about Radiohead's business model of allowing fans to decide how much they should spend on the band's new CD, <I>In Rainbows</I>?
That, somehow, the "absolute sound" of live music is locked up within the grooves or pits of the discs we play and can be retrieved in its entirety if only we had a a good enough playback system is one of the enduring myths in high-end audio. Yet the art of recording is just that, an art, and it is entirely possible that a better playback system will sound worse with some recordings. And with the mainstream press telling would-be audiophiles that low–bit-rate MP3s are of "CD quality" and that even CD is overkill for audiophile sound quality, why would anyone need high-resolution recordings?
On October 4, a federal jury in Duluth, MN found Jammie Thomas liable for copyright infringement, imposing a damages assessment of $220,000 ($9250 for each of 24 songs). It was the first jury trial resulting from the series of lawsuits the recording industry began in September 2003. Since most of those suits were settled out of court (average settlement: $4000) or defaulted, <I>Capitol Records v. Thomas</I> was the rare case to actually go to court and in front of a jury. It was interesting in ways other than its seemingly high damages.
Radiohead, whose last recording, <I>Hail to the Thief</I>, debuted at number three on <I>Billboard</I>'s top 200 chart in 2004, announced that its new recording, <I>In Rainbows</I>, will be available as a DRM-free download on October 10. The new twist, however, is that consumers can pay any amount they wish for it.