My inbox is blowing up. Every other second, it's <i>ding, ding, ding.</i> New mail, new mail, new mail. Press conferences, product announcements, and party invitations from hundreds of companies who will be exhibiting during the four far too short days that make up the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show.
I don't remember the year, but I remember the moment when I first became intensely curious about Roy DuNann. It must have been about 1975, right after I moved to Seattle. I bought a Sonny Rollins LP called <I>Way Out West</I>, took it home, cued it up on my Thorens turntable, dropped the tonearm, and suddenly I was in a room with Rollins and Shelly Manne and Ray Brown. It was a shipping room with records stacked on shelves all around the musicians, but I wouldn't know that until many years later.
<I>Technology Review</I>, which is one of the magazines I not only eagerly await, but read from cover to cover, published <A HERF="http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=19845"… 14 page screed against network news</A> by John Hockenberry in the January/February issue.
<B>WAGNER: <I>Siegfried</I></B>
Reiner Goldberg, Siegfried; Heinz Zednik, Mime; James Morris, Wanderer; Hildegard Behrens, Brünnhilde; Ekkehard Wlaschiha, Alberich; Kurt Moll, Fafner; Birgitta Svendén, Erda; Kathleen Battle, Forest Bird; Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, James Levine<BR>
Deutsche Grammophon 429 407-2 (4 CDs only). Cord Garben, Claudia Hamann, prods.; Wolfgang Mitlehner, eng. DDD. TT: 4:10:29
<I>The Economist</I> has an uncredited article about <A HREF="http://www.economist.com/world/europe/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=1027… charts</A>. They're all familiar to readers of Edward Tufte's <I>The Visual Display of Quantative Information</I>, but they <I>are</I> great charts.
When I picked up the mail on Saturday, I had an unexpected package. It contained Vance Dickason's <A HREF="http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=9781882580477"><I>Loudspeaker Design Cookbook, 7<SUP>th</SUP> Edition</I></A>. Oh boy!
Formats teetered, new products were released, and retailers gave up the ghost. In your opinion, what was the biggest audio story of 2007?
The world of loudspeaker aficionados has at one end most of us, who use multi-way box speakers of one kind of another; in the center are the lovers of panels, electrostatic, planar magnetics—it doesn't matter as much as the fact there is no box—and at the extreme other end are the lovers of high-sensitivity designs, where massive amounts of art, artifice, and loving care are applied to wrest full-range sound from a single drive-unit. Overcoming the daunting problems of getting a single drive-unit to work from 20Hz to 20kHz is, by those, felt to be outweighed by the benefits of not having a crossover circuit.
When we awoke on December 30, we found our in-boxes full of emails linking to <I>The Washington Post</I>'s <A HREF="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/28/AR20071… Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use"</A>, which reported that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) were charging that Jeffrey and Pamela Howell's transfer of 2000 legally purchased recordings to his computer as MP3 files represented "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.
