Closer and Closer
Days pass, there are weddings and funerals, pink flowers smile everywhere, and we get closer and closer to the 2007 Home Entertainment Show.
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Countdown to Ecstasy
Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! Tonight, John Atkinson is going to give me an honest to God <I>production</I> copy of the Attention Screen <I>Live at Merkin Hall</I> CD. You need to get one too. In the meantime, here's an interview with one of the truly great improvisors, Keith Jarrett.
Words and Music
MIT Media Lab has posted a survey seeking to discover "what words people use to describe sounds—and whether everyone uses a common vocabulary, or whether the choice of words is related to a person's musical or cultural background—and how the chosen words relate to a sound's timbral characteristics."
A Matter of Scale
Subway maps of the world, rendered to scale. Why do I link to that? Because it's got subways . . . and maps . . . and, uh, scale.
The 25 Most Exquisitely Sad Songs in the Whole World
<I>Spinner</I> picks 'em. Yeah, it's a list, but this one has the songs embedded, so you can hear the ones you don't know—or the ones you love, for that matter.
How often do you get to listen to an entire album uninterrupted?
Audiophiles treasure the time spent listening to their systems—but how often do you get to listen to an entire album uninterrupted?
New Laws May Doom Second-Hand CD Sales
John Mitchell, an outside counsel for the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM), warns that Florida and Utah have passed second-hand goods legislation (familiarly known as "pawn-shop laws") that could make the buying and selling of used CDs extremely unprofitable for stores and inconvenient for consumers trying to unload music they no longer wish to own.
Pass Labs Starts Over Again in the US
It began with an email from reader Ed Hoffman. "I was looking for a Pass Labs dealer and found out that Pass Labs has dumped all of their dealers around the country. Do you have any information about what is going on?"
Internet Radio Reprieve?
Internet radio streams have received a reprieve from the US Copyright Review Board (CRB) decision to <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/news/042307net/">restructure the royalty fees</A> for the format. In March, the CRB established fees, effective retroactively to the beginning of 2006, that would be ramped up each year through 2010, with a cost of 0.08¢ per performance (per listener) in 2006, going up to 0.11¢ in 2007; 0.14¢ in 2008; 0.18¢ in 2009; and 0.19¢ in 2010.
Thiel CS5 loudspeaker
<B>John Atkinson Opens</B>
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I've said it before and I'll say it again: a would-be loudspeaker designer shouldn't even start to <I>think</I> about the possibility of maybe designing a full-range, multi-way loudspeaker until he (and they do all appear to be men) has cut his teeth on a small two-way design. There is still as much art as science in designing a successful loudspeaker, even with all the computer-aided this and Thiele-and-Small that, that even a two-way design requires a designer either to be possessed of a monster talent or of the willingness to undergo months, even years, of tedious and repetitive work—or of both. For a would-be speaker engineer to start his career with a wide dynamic-range, multi-way design, intended to cover the entire musical spectrum from infra-bass to ultra-treble, seems to me to be a perfect case of an admittedly well-intentioned fool rushing in where any sufficiently self-critical angel would fear to tread.