Consumer electronics stores have long carried computer gear, everything from laptops and desktop systems to software and accessories. Computer stores, led by Gateway Country stores, have slowly been moving in the other direction. Now it looks as if convergence in the retail realm is about to take another great leap forward.
The music goes round and round: An investment group led by former Universal Music chief Edgar Bronfman, Jr. is in the lead to acquire Warner Music Group (WMG) and Warner/Chappell Music Publishing from corporate parent Time Warner, according to reports issued the third week of November. Bronfman's group—a consortium of banks and venture capital firms—has offered $2.8 billion for Time Warner's musical properties, possibly forcing prior suitor EMI Group PLC to drop out of the bidding. On Thursday, November 20, EMI chairman Eric Nicoll told reporters that Time Warner had informed his company of "a possible proposal from another party as an alternative to our own firm offer."
Chip Stern finds the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/digitalsourcereviews/1103tjoeb">AH! Njoe Tjoeb 4000 CD player</A> to be a bargain in its modest price range. CS writes: "Consider the notion of an exceptionally musical, single-chassis CD player with a tubed output stage that evinces the kind of soundstaging depth, liquidity, timbral accuracy, high-frequency detail, and top-to-bottom smoothness for which, barely five years ago, consumers might have eagerly coughed up $3000 and more."
Grabbing a few big gulps can sometimes fill you up quickly, but it can also lead to a little indigestion. This proved to be the case for <A HREF="http://www.dm-holdings.com">D&M Holdings</A>, which filed results for the first half of its fiscal year, ending September 30, 2003, and its financial forecast for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2004 with the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
One of the keys to SACD's potential acceptance within the mass market is the hybrid disc format, ensuring that all of those Stones, Dylan, or Pink Floyd discs can be purchased by consumers with regular CD players. Although the DVD-Audio camp has <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/11515/index.html">played with the idea</A> of hybrid discs for its format, nothing has made it past the testing stages yet.
<B>MIKE GARSON: <I>The Oxnard Sessions, Volume Two</I></B><BR>
Mike Garson, piano; Eric Marienthal, alto & soprano sax; Brian Bromberg, bass; Ralph Humphry, Bill Mintz, drums<BR>
Reference Recordings RR-53CD (CD, LP to come). Keith Johnson, eng.; J. Tamblyn Henderson, prod. DDD. TT: 73:50
Lera Auerbach is an important new classical composer.
Autumn comes to the Cherry Valley Feed & Seed. The 50-lb sacks of sawgrass and lime give way to mulch and sand for local drives, and the swing sets and folding chairs and posthole diggers and bug zappers and flagpoles have been brought inside until next spring, which is scheduled for mid-June.
Audiophiles once took it as given that LPs sounded better than CDs—end of discussion. Things are no longer so cut-and-dried. In my seven years as a contributing editor to <I>Stereophile</I>, I've seen an enormous improvement in the quality of digital software and playback-delivery systems. The early-1980s recording and remastering anomalies that made listening to early digital recordings so fatiguing are largely things of the past, though advocates of massive compression, jacked-up gain, and compensatory EQ ("Sounds-better-on-cheap-radios," they dully chant) continue to sully the waters of natural resolution.
So, how are the format wars going? DVD-A or SACD or both? Have you bought into one or both of the high-rez audio formats