Will surround sound rejuvenate the music industry? That's the position many record label execs took when adding the capability to DVD-Audio and SACD years ago. But while they wait for the high-rez formats to catch on, <A HREF="http://www.srslabs.com">SRS Labs</A> has decided to add multichannel audio to the conventional compact disc.
Brian Damkroger listens long and hard to the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/digitalsourcereviews/604primare">Primare D30.2 CD player</A> noting, "Primare is reluctant to provide much technical detail about their designs, preferring to let their products do the talking." So after a little chatting, BD files his report.
The US Senate has gotten serious about going after file sharers. On Friday, June 25, senators approved legislation that would allow the Justice Department to impose heavy civil penalties on people found to have shared and/or downloaded copyrighted material over the Internet.
The NHT Xd DSP powered speaker demo was held at the Plaza Hotel in New York City last week and representatives from <A HREF="www.nhthifi.com">NHT</A> and its supporting cast, <A HREF="http://www.deqx.com/">DEQX</A> and <A HREF="http://www.PowerPhysics.com/">PowerPhysics</A>, opened by explaining the philosophy behind the new product and the essential components they each contributed (also see <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/022304nht/index.html">previous</A>).
Music copyright issues have been in the new of late, with the RIAA and music labels looking for stricter laws, and many consumer groups looking for more slack. What are your feelings about copyright when it comes to music?
Tom Jung's career has been dotted with numbers. In 1969, he and a partner founded Sound 80, a Minneapolis recording studio named by an advertising wizard who had previously conjured up the appellation Cure 81 for a Hormel ham, supposedly while sipping Vat 69 scotch. Some years later, engineers from another Midwestern company with a numeral in its name, 3M, stopped by with an experimental tape recorder that also employed digits. Those zeros and ones proved critical to the recordings Jung went on to engineer and produce at his next company, Digital Music Products, better known as DMP.
The Placette Audio Remote Volume Control is simplicity itself: a paperback-sized black box with one set of unbalanced inputs and outputs, a toggle switch (and a remote) to change the level, and a row of LEDs that light up to indicate the relative volume level. The signal path, too, is simple, with only a stepped attenuator between input and output. But this is not just any attenuator—it's a 125-step model built entirely with super-premium Vishay S-102 foil resistors.
The first time I heard an Audio Note preamp was seven or eight years ago, when I sampled their entry-level M1—a refreshingly musical thing that brought the same kind of color and drama to preamplification that Audio Note's more famous products brought to the driving of speakers. And the M1 cost only $1250 at the time, with phono stage. (Newcomers, please don't wince: That's awfully cheap for what it was.)
High-end audio has always been a tricky business, and in recent years it's become more so. Home theater is pulling in one direction, and MP3, iPods, and the Internet are pulling in another. And customer expectations—not just of sound quality, but also of usability and integration into their space and lives—are spiraling upward. The companies that are thriving amid these pressures seem to have adopted one of two strategies: either they focus more narrowly and try to convince the world to accept their vision, or they evolve their products in an attempt to anticipate the market.
Never content to rest on its laurels, <A HREF="http://www.ti.com/sc04141">Texas Instruments</A> continues to push the boundaries of chip performance, not only in the digital and video realms, but in the analog audio domain as well.