Last week, the Secure Digital Music Initiative announced that it would allow free MP3 downloads to co-exist with new encrypted forms of digital music transmission. Despite this, widespread concern in corporate legal departments about copyright-violation liability has prompted software developers to come up with blocking techniques to prevent pirated music from entering company "Intranets."
The <A HREF="http://www.jeffrowland.com/">Jeff Rowland Design Group</A> is alive and well and in no danger of going out of business. The company was the victim of hackers who recently broke into the company's website and posted a notice to the contrary.
Since the earliest days of stereo—the first experiments with more than single-channel sound happened back in the 1930s—recording and playback have been based on a horizontal model: left-center-right, left-rear, right-rear. "Laterality," as it's sometimes called, can be exploited very well in creating plausible sensations of spatial events, especially by film-industry sound engineers. The believable reproduction of music is considerably more problematic.
According to a recent report released by Information Technology researchers <A HREF="http://www.frost.com">Frost & Sullivan</A>, the world Internet audio market generated revenues totaling $42 million in 1998, which dwarfs the 1997 revenues by 1516%. The report predicts that this market will continue growing at a healthy rate, achieving an increase into the triple percentage digits by the end of 1999.
Wes Phillips writes, "I catch John's eye and wonder if he's pondering the same question I am: <I>What were we thinking?</I>" In addition to trying to push forward the limits of getting great sound onto tape, <I>Stereophile</I>'s release of <I>Rhapsody In Blue</I> would offer the public a groundbreaking arrangement of George Gershwin's most popular orchestral work. In "<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//features/124/">The <I>Rhapsody</I> Project</A>," Hyperion Knight and John Atkinson join Wes in chronicling their perspectives on the processes leading to this landmark recording.
The patter of the snare drum began softly and I leaned forward in my seat. Avery Fisher Hall fell silent as Riccardo Muti led the New York Philharmonic in Ravel's <I>Boléro</I>. Ravel once described this masterpiece as "lasting 17 minutes and consisting wholly of orchestral texture without music—of one long, very gradual crescendo." Though the hall was silent and expectant, the stage was packed with musicians waiting for...what? To gradually join in, one by one and layer by layer, to drive that gentle but relentlessly mounting crescendo. Ravel accomplished this by "having solo instruments play the melody...[then progressing] to groups" and finally "arranging the scoring so that the dynamics are self-regulating" (footnote 1). When the final, thunderous E-major chord stopped the piece by locking "all its harmonic gears," the hall erupted in ecstatic applause, and we all leapt to our feet.
One room at the 1999 CES in Las Vegas that knocked me for a loop was the Avalon/Classé installation mentioned in my April show report. Classé had just debuted the Omega preamp, the companion piece to the Omega amplifier I reviewed in March. It proved a very suave, musical, and high-performance marriage.
As a follow-up to last week's question, we'd like to know what audio gear gets your vote for best-looking product of all time.
If <A HREF="http://lydstrom.com/">Lydstrom, Inc.</A> has anything to do with it, the next hot ticket in home audio won't be just another CD player, but a musical database manager capable of organizing and playing as many as 5000 songs, from CDs or from Internet downloads. The Boston, Massachusetts-based company announced June 30 that it has licensed <A HREF="http://www.lucent.com/">Lucent Technologies</A>' Enhanced Perceptual Audio Coder (ePAC) for inclusion in a product as yet unnamed but projected to be available by Christmas 1999.
Last week, <A HREF="http://www.ti.com">Texas Instruments</A>, <A HREF="http://www.liquidaudio.com">Liquid Audio</A>, Fraunhofer, and <A HREF="http://www.sandisk.com">SanDisk</A> announced that they've teamed to offer what they describe as "the first complete solution" for the secure downloading of music off the Internet onto portable audio players. The companies say that their programmable DSP-based technology is the first to meet the newly released <A HREF="www.sdmi.org">Secure Digital Music Initiative</A> (SDMI) guidelines for digital music portable devices, and is now available for manufacturers who want to develop secure players in time for Christmas 1999.