Have you seen that advertisement running on the Arts & Entertainment channel? A girl and her brother are arguing in front of their TV: "Are not." "Are so." "Are not." Etc., etc. Finally, she punts: "Mom! He's calling me a <I>neo-fatalist</I> again!" From off-screen: "Do I have to come in there and demonstrate your free will?"
Someday we may speak wistfully to our grandchildren about the "golden age" of digital audio when consumer formats (CD and DAT) contained a bitstream that was an exact bit-for-bit duplicate of the original studio master recording—not a digitally compressed, filtered, copy-resistant version whose sound is "close enough" to the original. Digitally compressed formats such as DCC and MiniDisc represent, in effect, a return to the pre-CD era when consumer-release formats were always understood to be imperfect copies of the studio original. Even the most ardent audiophile accepted the fact that LPs and mass-produced tapes did not, and could not, sound as good as the master tapes they were derived from.
High-quality digital audio systems require that all digital interfaces in the signal path exhibit signal transparency. The widely adopted AES/EBU and S/PDIF interfaces have been criticized for a lack of signal transparency; here we (footnote 1) address possible problems with such interfaces and present methods for improving the interface standard.
Warner Music Group rebounds: WMG announced Thursday August 19 that it was near completion of a major corporate restructuring, a move expected to save as much as $250 million annually. WMG had originally projected savings of $60 million per year. Earlier this year, the company was acquired by an investment consortium led by Edgar Bronfman, Jr., scion of the Seagram family of Montreal and former chief of Universal Music.
The entertainment industry is pondering its next move in the wake of a legal setback delivered Thursday, August 19. On that day, a Federal appeals court in San Francisco upheld a ruling by a lower court in Los Angeles that file-sharing software made by Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks, Inc. does not violate US copyright law. The three-judge panel voted unanimously in favor of the defendants.
Even if you win, sometimes you lose—a lesson the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) might soon be learning if the results of a new poll are proven to reflect the long-term mainstream music buying mood.
On August 18, XM Radio invited the press to Manhattan's Rainbow Room to announce its latest product offerings. The locale was not unintentional, according to Chance Patterson, XM's vice president for programming operations, "This building [30 Rockefeller Plaza, headquarters of NBC] was at the center of radio's first flowering, and XM represents radio's future."
In his report on the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/loudspeakerreviews/804ml">MartinLogan Depth powered subwoofer</A>, Larry Greenhill laments, "Reviewing subwoofers is a lonely job that brings no respect." But can the Depth upset one of LG's longstanding prejudices to earn <I>his</I> respect?
In the "Letters" section of the September 2004 issue of <I>Stereophile</I>, veteran audio engineer Richard Burwen essentially says that some audiophiles like tube amps because they act as tone controls. Do you agree?
Power-line conditioning and exotic power cords, once considered the lunatic fringe of tweaking, have become normal parts of audiophile life. Over the last several years Shunyata Research, founded by former NSA research scientist Caelin Gabriel, has established itself as a leading innovator in the area. The company's latest efforts include the Hydra Model 8 power-distribution center ($1995), for use with whole systems or front ends; the two-outlet "mini" Hydra Model 2 ($395), intended for use with power amplifiers; and the Anaconda Alpha and Anaconda vX power cords ($1995), the new top models in the PowerSnakes line.