LATEST ADDITIONS

Last week we singled out DVD-Audio, which clearly has left readers wondering, when it comes to promotion. This week we get to see if SACD has done any better. Has SACD been marketed properly?

"You'd be hard-pressed to find a company more protective of its reputation than Krell," says Wes Phillips, as he heads off to evaluate the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/638/">Krell KAV-300<I>cd</I> CD player</A>. WP ponders whether that reputation is still intact as the company tries to save its customers some money.

Issues surrounding the music industry are heating up, and most stories revolve around the record labels, musicians, congress, consumers, and music pirates. Often lost in the noise is the importance of another major player in the business: the technical folks who make recorded music happen.

DVD-Audio proponents, ranging from record labels execs and mastering engineers to CE manufacturers, staged a press event on August 9 at Dolby Labs in Los Angeles in the hopes of rekindling interest in their format, which has been quietly trying to launch for the last year or so. Warner Bros Records has gone so far as to call this current effort a "re-launch", but after spending over four hours with the DVD-A folks, this reporter thinks there's a good chance we may be seeing yet another official launch once most of the current issues (detailed below) are sorted out.

The music industry's ongoing copyright and royalty battle took a refreshing turn Wednesday, August 7, when EMI Group PLC filed suit against AOL Time Warner, Inc. over the unpaid use of songs from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movies. Filed in US Court for the Southern District of New York, the suit seeks unspecified monetary damages and an injunction barring AOL Time Warner from playing songs from MGM classics such as <I>Singin' in the Rain</I> and <I>The Wizard of Oz</I>.

"My god. This was better than any hi-fi I had ever experienced&mdash;I actually had Sergei Rachmaninoff <I>in the room</I>, playing Mendelssohn just for <I>me</I>. I am not ashamed to say that I wept." I wrote those words in the January 2001 <I>Stereophile</I>, about hearing a piano-roll transcription of Rachmaninoff performing Mendelssohn's <I>Spinning Song</I> (Op.67 No.34) on a B&#246;sendorfer Imperial 290SE reproducing piano. I was in the middle of recording <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//musicrecordings/298/">Robert Silverman's cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas</A> at the Maestro Foundation in Santa Monica, where there just happened to be a floppy disk with Wayne Stahnke's transcription of the Rachmaninoff for the B&#246;sendorfer mechanism, which Stahnke invented.

DVD-Audio appears to be having a tough time gaining traction in the market, audiophile or otherwise. Any suggestions for getting its motor started? (We'll pick on SACD next week).