Making good its intention to move heavily into the ever-expanding consumer-electronics market, <A HREF="http://www.ti.com/">Texas Instruments</A> has announced that it will acquire chipmaker <A HREF="http://www.burrbrown.com/">Burr-Brown Corporation</A> for $7.6 billion in stock. Burr-Brown makes some of the most highly regarded A/D and D/A converter chips on the market, many of them used in high-end audio and home-theater products.
The demise of Apogee Acousitics three years ago was one of high-end audio's biggest losses. The company's ribbon loudspeakers were among the best-sounding and best-looking high-fidelity products ever made. What remained of Apogee was picked up by a/d/s/, which at the time made a commitment to supply parts and service for the thousands of speakers in use, but that plan appears to have been abandoned shortly after it was announced. Apogee owners have since had to fend for themselves.
For months now, the music industry has concentrated all its legal firepower on <A HREF="http://www.napster.com/">Napster</A>, the Silicon Valley–based software company that lets users share music; and against San Diego's <A HREF="http://www.mp3.com/">MP3.com</A>, which lets users upload their music to a central server and then access it from any Internet-connected computer. As of the end of June, it appears that MP3.com will likely be co-opted by the industry's Big Five until it is no longer a threat—two of the major labels have already settled with the startup—but Napster will fight on.
It was 2am on January 8, 2000, and I was sitting at the bar of the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas. I'd just arrived for the Consumer Electronics Show and was recovering from a stressful day of travel. The airlines have a new computerized ticketing technology called the "electronic ticket": you get a reservation and a confirmation number, but no physical plane ticket, itinerary, or the feelings of security that accompany those pieces of paper.
Although Kentucky loudspeaker manufacturer Thiel has produced some standmounted models for home-theater use, all of their serious music speakers have been floorstanders. Enter the PCS: even though styled to match every Thiel speaker since the groundbreaking CS5 of 1989, the 19"-high PCS sits on a stand, not the floor.
The Mirage OM-6 loudspeaker, from Canadian manufacturer Audio Products International, mightily impressed <I>Stereophile</I>'s Tom Norton when he reviewed it back in November 1997. But with its "omnipolar" design and powered woofer, the OM-6 wasn't a speaker for those of us with more conventional tastes in speaker design. So when I heard that Mirage's Ian Paisley was working on a high-performance two-way minimonitor based on the OM-6's drive-unit technology, I asked API's affable PR man, Jeff Percy, for review samples.
The Emerson String Quartet defies conventional wisdom. They like to take risks, and they use the adrenaline that creates to hone their music-making to a fine edge.
We're on a roll here, folks. Last week you told us about the worst singles of all time. Now let's up the ante: what about the worst albums?
With the music industry in retreat from classical music, dozens of the nation’s symphony orchestras, opera and ballet companies have decided to bring their work directly to the people. On June 12, an association of 66 orchestras and opera groups signed an agreement with the <A HREF="http://www.afm.org/">American Federation of Musicians</A> (AFM) that will let them put their music on the Internet, without interference or fee extraction by the recording business.
CD changers holding hundreds of discs at a time have found their place in a sizable percentage of consumer homes, and have proven especially useful in the custom installation market. Fans of these mega-changers love to drop their discs into one place, never having to crack open a CD case again. Drawbacks, however, include not being able to easily move the disc from home to car or portable, and the mechanical whirring and clanking the machines make as they slowly plow through the user's playlist.