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The 10th Rocky Mountain Audio Fest Starts Friday

Everyone's favorite audio show is about to get underway. The Rocky Mountain Audio Fest returns to the Denver Marriott Tech Center on October 11–13.

RMAF may not be the biggest consumer audio show in North America—that honor recently passed to T.H.E. Show Newport Beach—but even without a cigar show, car show, wine show, and airport right across the street, RMAF's 440 brands spread over 138 hotel rooms, 25 big rooms (and three more at the Hyatt across the street), a CANJAM headphone ballroom hosting a record 37 exhibitors, 14 software vendors (CDs, LPs, etc.), and 26 lobby exhibits is definitely something to get excited about.

AXPONA Acquired by JD Events

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."

Major Changes for Montreal & New York Shows

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.

The Annual High End Prague hi-fi show

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.

Ray Dolby, 1933–2013

Photo: Dolby Laboratories

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.

Sony to Push Hi-Rez Downloads & Playback

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.

Free Online Course on Beethoven's Piano Sonatas

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.

The 4th California Audio Show Starts Friday

The fourth annual California Audio Show is poised to get underway August 9–11 in a new venue, the Westin San Francisco Airport (Westin SFO), in Millbrae, CA. The only West Coast consumer fine-audio show between Newport Beach (in very southern California) and Denver, CAS4 is expected to draw close to 1000 audiophiles per day to listen to systems in at least 41 sound rooms, 16 of which are of medium or large size.

Wilson Audiophile Recordings Return

Many of David Wilson's highly acclaimed, long out-of-print recordings are poised to make old and new generations of audiophiles very happy. On August 1, the first two of a selected batch of Wilson Audiophile Recordings will return to circulation as high-resolution (176.4kHz/24-bit), CD-quality, and MP3 downloads. Distributed by Naxos via a host of mass-market and hi-res digital music stores, including Chandos' "The Classical Shoppe," eClassical24bit, HDMusic, HDTracks, HiResAudio, Linn Records, Onkyo, and Qobuz24bit, the first titles in the series are Recital, James B. Welch's disc of four centuries of organ music, and Beethoven and Enescu Sonatas, performed by violinist David Abel and pianist Julie Steinberg, this magazine's "Recording of the Month" for February 1984.
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