News

Speaking at the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress in Macau on November 13, Warner Music Group (WMG) chairman and CEO Edgar Bronfman, Jr. warned mobile phone executives to heed the mistakes of the record industry as it moved forward.

As we reportedhttp://www.stereophile.com/news/012907master/">reported; last January, The">http://www.tapeproject.com">The Tape Project, a collaboration among mastering engineers Paul Stubblebine and Michael Romanowski, both of Paul Stubblebine Mastering, and Dan Schmalle of Bottlehead, plans to release 10 master-quality tapes per year. The Tape Project's inaugural outing, available now, is The Number White by jazz vocalist Jaqui Naylor.

Mark Waldrep, the man behind the "only all-HD digital label," Aix Records, has now established an all-HD download site, www.itrax.com. While Music Giants and Linn offer HD downloads, iTrax calls itself "the only website to offer real HD in multiple mixing perspectives," since it offers consumers two-channel stereo, 5.1-channel "audience," and 5.1-channel "stage" perspectives in MP3, Dolby Digital, DTS, WMA pro, WMA Lossless, and PCM 96kHz/24-bit resolutions.

Olive">http://www.olive.us">Olive Media Products, manufacturers of audiophile-quality Olive music servers, has partnered with MusicGiantshttp://www.musicgiants.com">MusicGiants;, the leading site for CD-quality music downloads. Olive's well-received Opus line of digital players now allows users to download, store, manage, and play large collections of CD-quality music directly from MusicGiants without needing to buy or rip CDs, select track by track, or use a computer. (You can find John Atkinson's positive review of the Olive Symphony herehttp://www.stereophile.com/mediaservers/406olive/">here;.)

When we last heard from NBC Universal's CEO Jeff Zucker, he'd refused to renew the network's yearly contract with Apple's iTunes Store, leading Apple to">http://stereophile.com/news/090307nbc/">to immediately pull NBC shows from the store rather than have them yanked midseason. In addition, Apple managed to control the story so that NBC came off looking clueless and greedy. You'd think Zucker would have learned to keep his mouth shut from that media drubbing.

The invitation looked intriguing: "We are happy to welcome you to The Netherlands in September for the offical introduction of the Siltech Pantheon Loudspeaker." Siltechwww.siltechcables.com">Siltech; introducing a loudspeaker? I was well familiar with the Dutch company, celebrating its 25^th anniversary next year, as a cable manufacturer. Indeed, some of the first high-end cables I had found to sound better than what I had been used to were Siltechs, back in the mid-1980s. Paul Bolin had been impressed by his auditioning">http://www.stereophile.com/cables/1004siltech">auditioning of more recent G5 models in 2004. And Siltech's founder, Edwin van der Kley, is married to the irrepressible Gabi van der Kley, principal of Crystal Cable with whom I had had a rather intense breakfast meeting with during last May's Home">http://blog.stereophile.com/he2007">Home Entertainment 2007. (All conversations with Gabi are intense.) But loudspeakers?

A consortium of media and Internet companies announced a set of guidelines to protect copyrights online on October 19. Among the group, which has been negotiating for nine months, were Walt Disney Co.; Microsoft; NBC Universal; Viacom, Inc.; CBS Corp.; News Corp.'s MySpace and Fox constituents; Veoh Networks, Inc.; and Dailymotion S.A. Noticeable for its absence was Google, including YouTube, which has recently been sued for $1 billion for infringement by Viacom.