More Lawsuits vs. Music Fans
The music industry may be going the way of the dinosaur, but if so, it's going to go down with its army of lawyers fighting all the way to the bitter end.
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In a landmark special feature, Chris Dunn & Malcolm Omar Hawksford thoroughly dissect the vicissitudes of the digital interface and jitter in <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/features/396bits">Bits is Bits?</A> The authors note, "The <I>theoretical</I> performance obtainable from the 16-bit linear PCM format sampled at 44.1kHz is superior to any analog sources available to the consumer."
What has been your favorite equipment review of all time in Stereophile?
We'll get to your least favorite next week, but this week, we want to know what your all-time favorite equipment review in <I>Stereophile</I> has been
Bang For the Buck: Quality vs Cost
It was a powder blue Pinto. Brand new, it drove like a bowl of Jello with wheels. No matter how firmly I gripped the steering wheel, I had no confidence that it had any kind of relationship with the wheels on the road. And pickup? There was none. But because its designers had sacrificed all quality to build it cheaply, the Ford Pinto was equally cheap to rent when I did so back in 1980.
Auditions, the Audio Press, & Neo-fatalism
Have you seen that advertisement running on the Arts & Entertainment channel? A girl and her brother are arguing in front of their TV: "Are not." "Are so." "Are not." Etc., etc. Finally, she punts: "Mom! He's calling me a <I>neo-fatalist</I> again!" From off-screen: "Do I have to come in there and demonstrate your free will?"
A Question of Bits
Someday we may speak wistfully to our grandchildren about the "golden age" of digital audio when consumer formats (CD and DAT) contained a bitstream that was an exact bit-for-bit duplicate of the original studio master recording—not a digitally compressed, filtered, copy-resistant version whose sound is "close enough" to the original. Digitally compressed formats such as DCC and MiniDisc represent, in effect, a return to the pre-CD era when consumer-release formats were always understood to be imperfect copies of the studio original. Even the most ardent audiophile accepted the fact that LPs and mass-produced tapes did not, and could not, sound as good as the master tapes they were derived from.
Bits is Bits?
High-quality digital audio systems require that all digital interfaces in the signal path exhibit signal transparency. The widely adopted AES/EBU and S/PDIF interfaces have been criticized for a lack of signal transparency; here we (footnote 1) address possible problems with such interfaces and present methods for improving the interface standard.
Industry Roundup
Warner Music Group rebounds: WMG announced Thursday August 19 that it was near completion of a major corporate restructuring, a move expected to save as much as $250 million annually. WMG had originally projected savings of $60 million per year. Earlier this year, the company was acquired by an investment consortium led by Edgar Bronfman, Jr., scion of the Seagram family of Montreal and former chief of Universal Music.
Court: File-swapping Software OK
The entertainment industry is pondering its next move in the wake of a legal setback delivered Thursday, August 19. On that day, a Federal appeals court in San Francisco upheld a ruling by a lower court in Los Angeles that file-sharing software made by Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks, Inc. does not violate US copyright law. The three-judge panel voted unanimously in favor of the defendants.
RIAA Heavy Handed?
Even if you win, sometimes you lose—a lesson the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) might soon be learning if the results of a new poll are proven to reflect the long-term mainstream music buying mood.