<I>Blender</I> has just posted its nominations for <A HREF="http://www.blender.com/articles/default.aspx?key=18696">greatest record industry screw-ups</A>. I have a few quibbles, but as a whole, <I>Blender</I> tells a tale of monumental stupidity,from Decca passing on the Beatles because Dick Rowe was irritated that too many frantic teens were attempting to get into the Cavern Club to shutting down Napster without having a legitimate channel to replace it.
Like <a href="http://stereophile.com/thefifthelement/208fifth/">John Marks</a> and my uncle <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/021308sing/">Omar</a>, I am prone to enthusiasms. It's not unusual for me to hear some new piece of music and wind up feeling that I need it—<i>neeeeeeed</i> it. So what? Music is great. It <i>is</i> unusual for me, though, to hear some new piece of music and be so moved by it that I leave work early, race up Madison Avenue, charge down into Grand Central, take the 4 to Union Square, and face the many temptations of the vast Virgin Megastore to buy that new piece of music.
Even the most savvy <I>Stereophile</I> reader might wonder what a "network music player" is. Linn rightly considers a <I>music server</I> to be a combination of 1) stored digital files, 2) music-management software, and 3) a device that uses #2 to transfer #1 to your hi-fi. What Linn's Klimax DS <I>is</I> is a high-quality digital-to-analog converter (DAC) that receives digital data through an Ethernet connection rather than optical or electrical S/PDIF or AES/EBU inputs.
<A HREF="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1582330-1,00.html">Her…; an interesting article about Princeton University composer Dmitri Tymoczko, who has string theory mathematics to represent the relationship of musical chords to one another in a graphic form.
Bad news. Last June 15, in my <A HREF= http://blog.stereophile.com/fredkaplan/061507jazz/ >
first entry</A> of the “Jazz Messengers” blog, I broke the news that three months hence, Sonny Rollins, the world’s greatest living tenor saxophone player, would be playing a rare trio concert at Carnegie Hall—with Roy Haynes (one of the two greatest living drummers) and Christian McBride (an outstanding young bassist)—and that his own record label, Doxy, would release the results on CD along with a similar, recently unearthed, never-before-heard trio session that Rollins played at Carnegie 50 years earlier.
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UK newspaper <I>The Telegraph</I> reported March 3 that Sir Paul McCartney has signed a $6 million deal to release the Beatles catalog to iTunes for downloading. While <I>The Independent</I> and the <I>Daily Mail</I> have also reported the same thing, there has been no confirmation from Apple, EMI, McCartney, surviving Beatle Ringo Starr, or the families of deceased members John Lennon or George Harrison.
In the April issue of <I>Stereophile</I>, John Marks talks about using Sony's original Playstation as a CD player. What's the most unusual source you've ever used in your system, analog or digital?
