Do you adjust your balance control at all?
Last week we picked on tone controls, so this week, we'll put the spotlight on the balance knob. Do you use it in your system? Is it at any setting other than dead center?
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DVD-Audio 411
One of the great things about the DVD-Audio format is the sheer flexibility built into the standard: two-channel or multichannel (mixed for four, five, or six speakers), multiple resolutions, multiple encode/decode choices (MLP, Dolby Digital, DTS, PCM), and an assortment of special features, including video.
Engineer/Producer Tom Dowd Dies
Tom Dowd, a recording engineer and producer who created some of the greatest pop, jazz, and rock recordings of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, and who ushered in the era of multi-track tape recording and stereo playback, died Sunday, October 27 of emphysema at an assisted living center in Aventura, Florida, near Miami. He was 77.
Record Labels Beware
One would think the last thing the music industry needs right now is to further alienate its customers who are still buying discs. But that is just what the record labels are doing by secretly experimenting with technology that restricts how discs are used, says a new report.
Numbers Up for Japanese Electronics Firms
The first half of the fiscal year has been generally kind to many Japanese electronics manufacturers, most of whom released financial reports at the end of October.
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Brian Damkroger has a wonderful moment or two as he auditions the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//amplificationreviews/697/">VAC Renaissance Signature Mk.II preamplifier</A>. As BD explains, the right musical situation can trigger those long-lost memories . . . .
Sisters in Sound
We all know that women generally have better hearing than men and enjoy music at least as much as men do, but women are conspicuously absent from every segment of the high-end audio scene. The vast majority of high-end companies are owned by men, and any head count of female designers, retailers, reviewers, or consumers will yield a pitifully small number. High-end audio is a man's, man's, man's world.
Do you ever use your bass/treble/EQ controls?
Reader Stephen M. Rose wants <I>Stereophile</I> readers to confess their audio sins. Do you ever use tone controls in your current system?
Kathy Gornik to Chair CEA Board
During the week of October 14, <A HREF="http://www.thielaudio.com">Thiel Audio Products</A> president Kathy Gornik completed an unprecedented triple play.
Added to the Archives This Week
"We are now well past the era in which every review of digital playback equipment had to begin with an apology for the medium," writes Thomas J. Norton. As a case in point, TJN takes the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/692/">Mark Levinson No.37 CD transport & No.36S D/A converter</A> out for a couple of spins.