The next <A HREF="http://www.homeentertainment-expo.com">Home Entertainment Expo</A> (formerly the Hi-Fi Show) will be in New York May 11-13. We usually run several live forums covering the gamut of audiophile topics, including the popular "grill the editors" sessions. Are there any audio topics you'd particularly like to see covered this year?
As Michael Fremer puts it, "In analog, it's the little things that count, and Rega's upgrade of the basic Planar 3 design to the Planar 25 can only be described as visibly 'small.' But the sonic improvements I heard during my first encounter with the $1275 arm/'table combo were audibly <I>big</I>." Fremer takes a close look at and listen to the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//analogsourcereviews/309/">Rega Planar 25 turntable</A> for <I>Stereophile</I> readers and attempts to reveal all of its secrets. Sam Tellig adds his two cents' worth.
According to the latest statistics from the <A HREF="http://www.ce.org">Consumer Electronics Association</A> (CEA), overall consumer electronics sales for 2000 posted gains of 7% over 1999, reaching $8 billion. However, overall audio sales at the end of 2000 dropped as compared with November 1999, declining 5%, with $854 million in revenues for the month. The CEA says that sales to dealers of separate audio components also declined in November dipping around 4% as compared to the same period in 1999, but overall, sales of separate audio components have had a positive year rising 7% to $1.4 billion in revenue thus far.
Drummer Billy Higgins started his remarkable career backing up R&B musicians such as Amos Milburn and Bo Diddley around the LA area before embarking on his jazz path with the Jazz Messengers (led by Don Cherry and saxophonist James Clay) and Dexter Gordon. But it was his association with Ornette Coleman, starting in the mid 1950s, that electrified the jazz world and made him a force to reckon with. His first recordings, with Coleman and Red Mitchell, were released in 1958. In 1959, he performed with both Coleman in New York and Thelonious Monk in San Francisco, and from that point on, he never stopped recording or touring.
Price-fixing by major record labels isn't confined to the United States. The music industry's "Big Five" (Universal Music, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, EMI Group PLC, and the Bertelsmann Music Group) are now under the scrutiny of European Union antitrust investigators, who are looking into the possibility that the companies may have colluded to keep CD prices artificially high in Europe. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and music industry agreed to <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10744/">settle</A> the American version of the issue in May 2000.
In a move that some cynics are calling "the beginning of the end" for the <A HREF="http://www.sdmi.org/">Secure Digital Music Initiative</A>, the group's director has abruptly resigned. Leonard Chiariglione, who has headed the cross-industry anti-piracy organization since its inception more than two years ago, made the announcement Wednesday, January 24 at the first SDMI meeting of 2001.
Citing the desire to take advantage of the power of sharing audio files over the Internet, one of the larger independent record labels, <A HREF="http://www.tvtrecords.com/">TVT Records</A>, announced last week that it has withdrawn its copyright claims against the file-sharing company <A HREF="http://www.napster.com/">Napster</A>. TVT said that the basis for its decision to end the lawsuit and provide its support to Napster is "the new service Napster is evolving under the strategic alliance it recently announced with Bertelsmann AG." TVT points out that, since Bertelsmann is still technically a party to litigation with Napster, it becomes the first record label to fully settle with the beleagured Web company.
Musical arguments in favor of separate components are compelling and well-documented. But there's also something musical to be said about reducing the number of power sources, keeping signal paths short and direct, and hard-wiring connections between components rather than employing multiple sets of interconnects. So while a designer must inevitably confront certain tradeoffs, the explosive growth and popularity of single-box products in the past few years contradicts the received wisdom passed down by some of the more sniffy audiophiles: that such unduly proletarian products are terminally compromised in terms of absolute levels of music reproduction.
The dCS Purcell is named after Henry Purcell, the English composer, organist, bass, countertenor who was born in 1659 and died in, alas, 1695. It's a digital/digital converter intended for consumer use, as opposed to the less elegantly packaged pro-audio version, the dCS 972, that I <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/260/">reviewed</A> in February 1999. Both devices increase the sample rate and/or word length of the output from linear PCM digital audio sources like CD or DVD up to a maximum sample rate of 192kHz and a word length of 24 bits. According to the extensive documentation, this is achieved by "using extremely powerful and accurate digital interpolation filters, which yield an output signal having negligible levels of distortion."