A slump in the music business is officially over. Sales of recorded music in the United States last year totaled $14.6 billion, an all-time high. The figure is a 6.3% increase from 1998's total of $13.7 billion, the previous record, according to a recent <A HREF="http://www.riaa.com/stats/press/021800.htm">report</A> from the <A HREF="http://www.riaa.com/">Recording Industries Association of America</A> (RIAA).
In a statement that may have far-reaching ramifications for the online digital music-distribution business, last week <A HREF="http://www.sonic.com">Sonic Solutions</A> and <A HREF="http://www.sony.co.jp">Sony</A> announced at the Audio Engineering Society Convention (AES) in Paris that they would collaborate to integrate Sony's ATRAC3 (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding 3) into iMaster, Sonic's suite of tools for the preparation of compressed audio for Internet distribution.
<B>KEITH JARRETT: <I>The Melody at Night, With You</I></B><BR> Keith Jarrett, piano<BR> ECM 1675 (CD). 1999. Keith Jarrett, prod., eng.; Manfred Eicher, prod. DDD. TT: 55:18<BR> Performance <B>****1/2</B><BR> Sonics <B>****?</B>
February 2000—We are now comfortably past all the millennial hype, which, by New Year's Eve, really <I>had</I> risen to a nauseating fever pitch. But it's hard not to look back to the times, the places, and, most of all, to the faces and personalities that populated the last hundred years.
Several companies, such as TacT, SigTech, and Perpetual Technologies, are offering products that can digitally equalize your speakers to counteract problems in your listening room. Is this of interest to you?
Merger mania in high-end land: Loudspeaker manufacturer <A HREF="http://www.halesdesigngroup.com/">Hales Design Group</A> and digital audio manufacturer <A HREF="http://www.wadia.com/">Wadia Digital Corporation</A> are joining forces to create what the companies' executives are calling "new digital products for the new millennium." The announcement was made February 14 at Wadia headquarters in River Falls, Wisconsin.
According to figures just released by the <A HREF="http://www.ce.org">Consumer Electronics Association</A> (CEA), revenues from manufacturer-to-dealer sales of audio products in December 1999 totaled nearly $568 million, a 6.3% increase over the previous December. CEA reports that the strong month's sales pushed year-end revenue totals to their highest mark in four years: total audio shipment revenues in 1999 surpassed the $8 billion mark for the first time since 1995, growing by 2% over 1998.
Markus Sauer is in a ponderous audio mood: "When several listeners each play music they like on the system, their reaction should be more uniform. But it isn't. What irks me is that, while we seem to be able to agree pretty well on how a system sounds, there seems to be no consistency of emotional reaction to this sound . . . " Sauer works through this troubling aspect of being an audiophile in "<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//features/203/">God is in the Nuances</A>." "This journal has seen a number of thoughtful ruminations on what it is that attracts us to music or to a given audio component, and how we should describe that attraction." Now it's Sauer's turn.
Satellite radio got a boost toward wider market acceptance on February 16, when <A HREF="http://www.siriusradio.com/">Sirius Satellite Radio</A> and <A HREF="http://www.xmradio.com/">XM Satellite Radio</A> announced an agreement to develop a unified standard for satellite radios. The current batch of satellite receivers can pick up transmissions from one of the providers, but not both. The next generation of receivers will expand the technology's reach by enabling reception of both companies' broadcasts.