News

Friday, November 22–Sunday, November 24: The Hi-Fi Expo Sofia will be held at the Grand Hotel (1 Gurko Street, Sofia, Bulgaria). Over 250 high-end brands are expected to exhibit. Show manager Gergana Boeva reports that attendance has grown steadily over the show's first three years, attracting visitors from all throughout Bulgaria, as well as neighboring countries Serbia, Macedonia, Greece, and Romania. For more info, including a complete list of exhibitors, visit the show’s official website.

The long-anticipated opening of Brian Berdan’s high-performance audio store, Audio Element, took place on November 1 and 2 in Pasadena, CA. The store’s prime location in the heart of Pasadena’s retail- and restaurant-rich Oldtown helped sweeten the unveiling of America’s newest high-end emporium.

Friday, October 25, 6–9pm: Whetstone Audio (2401 East 6th St. #1001, Austin, TX) will host its next "Hi-Fi Hootenanny." Rega's Paul Darwin will introduce the company's new Elicit-R integrated amplifier and Saturn-R CD player/DAC, which made their official debuts at last week's Rocky Mountain Audio Fest. For more info, visit WhetstoneAudio.com.

The 2013 Burning Amp, the DIYAudio forum's "annual experiment in temporary community dedicated to radical self-expression and self-reliance," got off to a slow start. Although a semi-hidden posting about the one-day, all-volunteer event, held in six rooms at San Francisco's Fort Mason Center on Sunday, October 6, appeared months ago, the email blast to the Burning Amp mailing list only went out late on October 3. As a result, attendance was light, making it much easier to listen to music in the extremely live, audio unfriendly rooms.

Central to every Burning Amp is Nelson Pass (above), whose boundless generosity and support to DIYers worldwide has made him a father figure of sorts.

In what may be a record period for audio show acquisitions. Connecticut-based trade show company JD Events has acquired AXPONA (Audio Expo North America). The announcement follows on the heels of UK-based The Chester Group's announcement that it has bought Montreal's Salon Son et Image, and gotten out of the way of AXPONA Chicago by moving its New York Show to a fall date in Brooklyn.

In its own words, JD Events "is dedicated to the creation of targeted and innovative industry-leading events that deliver results. The company brings together highly qualified buying audiences, education-rich content and high-level networking opportunities—all geared toward increasing business transactions in the markets it serves."

Roy Bird's UK-based Chester Group, which currently produces the New York Audio Show, has announced the acquisition of Montreal's Salon Son et Image. While the show will continue to take place in Montreal's Hilton Bonaventure in late March—March 28–30 in 2014—Sarah Tremblay, former co-producer of Montreal show with her husband, Michel Plante, will join the Chester Group team and assume overall management of both North American shows.

In addition, to avoid 2013's industry-taxing situation of the Montreal, Chicago, and New York shows taking place with only two or three weeks between each, the Chester Group has decided to move the New York show from April to September.

Saturday–Sunday, October 5–6, 10am–6pm: The annual High End Prague hi-fi show will be held at the Corinthia Towers Hotel. The admission price per day is about $5 US and includes automatic entry into a "hi-fi lottery," with a chance to win Monitor Audio loudspeakers, Focal and Grado headphones, IsoTek electronics, and more. A percentage of the money earned from High End Prague goes to the Czech UNICEF. For a complete exhibitor list and more info, visit www.high-end-praha.cz.

We are saddened to learn of the passing of inventor and audio entrepreneur Ray Dolby. Other sites have published full obituaries; I'd like simply to offer my memory of interviewing Ray back in the spring of 1977 for the English magazine Hi-Fi News, when Dolby Laboratories were trying to get the BBC interested in using Dolby noise reduction in FM broadcasting. Despite my being a neophyte audio writer, I was treated with courtesy and respect by a man who had forgotten more about audio engineering than I knew.

It was like old times. A major consumer electronics company was presenting a press conference in a high-rent venue to introduce its new audio products. These events used to be commonplace; now they are rare. But on September 4, in Manhattan's Jazz at Lincoln Center, to an audience that included record company executives from Universal, Warner, and Sony Music, HDTracks' Norman and David Chesky, Chad Kassem and Marc Sheforgen from Acoustic Sounds, whose new DSD download store was last week's big news, musician Herbie Hancock, and veteran mastering engineer Mark Wilder, Phil Molyneux, President and Chief Operating Officer of Sony Electronics since September 2010, announced that the company saw high-resolution audio as the future of recorded music playback.

In collaboration with Coursera, the online learning company, and starting September 3, The Curtis Institute will be offering at no charge the course Exploring Beethoven's Piano Sonatas, taught by Curtis Institute's Neubauer Family Foundation Chair in Piano Studies Jonathan Biss. The course will last five weeks, with an anticipated workload of 1–2 hours a week.