News

MusicGiants, which bills itself as "the leader in HD music downloads," announced November 7 an agreement with Inteset, which manufacturers high-end media servers and advanced extender systems.

Jeff Lloyd, Inteset's CEO, said, "Working with MusicGiants is a good match for Inteset. Our dealers will appreciate the opportunity to provide this convenience to their customers."

What convenience? you may be asking. In an exclusive interview with Stereophile, Scott Bahneman, MusicGiants' CEO, explained: "What we've done with Inteset and our other partners is provide them a way to put our HD Media Store inside their hardware. That means when an Inteset customer wants to buy more music, he or she can hit that button on the user interface and buy HD downloads in full resolution.

"It's like putting a Tower Records right in their box—Tower in the old days, when you could buy deep catalog. If you're looking for jazz and classical deep catalog these days, there are very few places where you can get that."

Bahneman stressed that MusicGiants was "pushing" its hardware partners to "improve their sound cards and go to separate external DACs," which is one reason he was so excited about the Inteset alliance. "The gear is excellent and our music is excellent, so that eliminates the weak link in the chain."

At CEDIA 2006, MusicGiants was demonstrating Elliot Mazer–remastered 24/96 and 24/88.2 PCM transfers of SACD masters, which the company dubbed Super HD. "Within the next few weeks—certainly by the time of the Consumer Electronics Show in January—the list of available titles will exceed 100 recordings of Super HD high-rez music downloads. We've licensed over 400 titles, but we've already remastered, or are almost done remastering, the first 100 into Windows Media Lossless."

But that's not all, Bahneman said. "We're now beginning to offer very large collections of music that are delivered initially on a hard drive and when you plug them in, your server will call back into our server and assign the digital keys for DRM. It's really slick, especially when you get into these huge Super HD lossless files, because when you jump to 24-bit resolution, it's ten times bigger—downloads that size are not lickety-split, shall we say? So we've had people ask for, say, our top 100 titles in Super HD on a hard drive, and we're working on delivering that."

Bahneman projected the price for that would be "around $2500."

Bahneman was excited about the possibilities of high-rez downloads. "Our mission is to become the premium fuel that runs in the high-resolution gear that's being produced now. We don't think compressed music is the right solution. Here's the thing: If you want to get people excited about digital music, you've got to push the envelope on sound quality."