News

Keith Pray, Publisher of the Source Interlink Home Tech Network, is delighted to announce the launch of the newest Home Tech Group website AnalogPlanet.com, edited by the world’s foremost proponent of analog technology, Michael Fremer.

Arthel "Doc" Watson, one of America's greatest musical treasures, has died in Winston-Salem, North Carolina at the age of 89. A seven-time Grammy Award winner, Watson was known for his rich, unaffected singing voice, his apparently limitless repertoire of Appalachian folk songs, and a flatpicking guitar style that influenced a great many of his peers and inspired countless others to take up the instrument.

Oswalds Mill Audio, the Pennsylvania-based company that designs, manufactures, imports, and sells a range of vintage-inspired and mostly bespoke domestic playback gear, has opened a showroom in New York City. OMA Dumbo, named for its historic neighborhood (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), now occupies the entire top floor of an industrial building at 110 Bridge Street in Brooklyn, walkable from either the Brooklyn or Manhattan Bridge.

If any single voice was synonymous with the flowering of the LP era, it was that of German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. The great artist's death at his home in Bavaria on Friday, May 18, 10 days short of his 87th birthday, sets the final seal on an age in which art song, oratorio, and opera received equal respect from record companies and the listening public.

Equally adept at all three disciplines, Fischer-Dieskau became perhaps the most recorded baritone in history. There was a period in which nary a month went by without another LP from Fischer-Dieskau on which he sang either solo or in ensemble. Even today, when so many recordings have gone out of print, and large number of LPs have never been remastered for CD, arkivmusic.com lists no less than 490 titles that include Fischer-Dieskau's voice. The most recent release, a four-SACD remastered compilation of some of the monaural Schubert lieder (art song) recordings he made with pianists Gerald Moore and Karl Engel early in his career, became available on the website on May 8. Its 39 performances are but a fraction of the Schubert recordings he made in his five decades before the microphone.

At 12 noon PST today, Dolby Laboratories, Inc. announced the availability of the first Blu-ray Discs™ premastered using Dolby® TrueHD with advanced 96k upsampling, The process, designed for use by studios, authoring houses, and mastering facilities, elevates playback performance of lossless audio on Blu-ray Disc™ by using the apodizing filter developed by Meridian.

Saturday, May 19, 11am–6pm: The Brooklyn Flea Record Fair will be held at Smorgasburg.

MartinLogan's Truth in Sound Tour makes a stop at Audio Advice in Pineville, North Carolina.