One of the things most frequently spoken about here is the absence of musical events during show hours, which dedicated attendees have always used to re-calibrate their ears, rest their aching feet, and reconnect with audio buddies who have wandered off on their own (footnote 1). Fortunately, the blues lunch featuring Honeyboy Edwards, courtesy of Acoustic…
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Saturday is always the crunch day at the Home Entertainment Show. There are more people in the halls, more bodies in the rooms, and more noise everywhere—and it's wonderful. People here really speak our language: audiogeek spoken here.
Back in September, the Secure Digital Music Initiative issued a public challenge that offered cash rewards for successfully uncovering and removing watermarks from recorded music. The challenge was met by a number of hackers, most notable among them Professor Edward Felten of Princeton University's Computer Science Department.
Felten and a group of colleagues—graduate students at his own institution as well as researchers at Rice University in Houston and at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in Silicon Valley—made quick work of several SDMI watermarking technologies, including one by…
The music industry's worst nightmare is coming true: feeble attempts to shackle compact discs with "protection" are falling prey to simple felt pen hacks. And it's too late to build use-restriction and tracking technologies directly into CD players and existing computer CD drives.
But the record labels are having better luck getting use-restriction circuitry installed in devices that support newer formats such as SACD and DVD-Audio. Verance and Texas Instruments Japan (TIJ) announced last week that TIJ will begin incorporating Verance's patented audio use restriction and content…
As we reported August 29, Sony BMG and the Warner Music Group, among others, have begun questioning the now defacto per song price of 99¢ set by Apple's iTunes Music Store.
On September 20, Apple CEO Steve Jobs weighed in on that question. "If they want to raise the prices, it means that they are getting greedy," Jobs said. "If the price goes up, [consumers] will go back to piracy and everybody loses."
Hmmm. We agree that consumers probably would feel misused if the prices went up, but we aren't so certain that downloading "piracy" caused all of the woes the record industry pins on…
April brought several important executive changes to the audio industry.
On the 15th, PSB Speakers announced David L. Smith’s appointment as director of product development. Formerly president and chief engineer of Snell Acoustics, Smith will be responsible for guiding product development on all PSB brand loudspeakers, including high-performance products and specialty items for the custom installation market. PSB products have a well-earned reputation for excellent value.
"I am very pleased to be joining PSB," Smith stated. "The company has a great reputation worldwide, both for…
Neither Verance nor Digimarc have made friends in the consumer world, as they continue to develop and implement watermarking technologies used to restrict the use of digital media, such as DVD-Audio and CD discs. Audiophiles, in particular, are resisting any form of restriction technology, such as watermarking, that alters the digital data on a disc at the expense of audio fidelity.
So it is with some amusement that we watch the watermarking heavyweights litigate each other in an attempt to control the patents underlying the restriction technology. Consider the irony: they are accusing…
According to a study published by anesthesiologists Chakib Ayoub, Laudi Rizk, Chadi Yaacoub, Dorothy Gaal, and Zeev Kain at the Yale School of Medicine, music reduces intraoperative sedative requirements in patients who received surgical procedures under anesthesia.
The study of 36 patients at the Yale–New Haven Hospital and 54 at the American University of Beirut Medical Center had the subjects wear headphones during the procedures. They were randomly chosen to hear music they liked, white noise, or nothing at all, other than the operating room sounds. Blocking the OR sounds with white…
A year without profits, a revolving door on the top floor, and potentially massive layoffs all spell trouble for BMG Entertainment.
Closing its fiscal year June 30 $150 million in the hole, the music giant has been plagued by infighting among top executives, the death of one, departures by others, and recently, an announcement that hundreds of jobs could be slashed in an effort to regain profitability. A downturn in the global music business and various one-time expenses (some of them related to Internet music ventures) contributed to the loss, according to several reports.
A unit of…
The radio industry's frenzy of mergers and acquisitions has slowed down but hasn't stopped. San Antonio-based Clear Channel Communications Inc., one of the largest radio broadcasters in the US, has agreed to acquire AMFM Inc., another major player. The merger will give Clear Channel more than 850 stations nationwide. The deal hinges on Clear Channel unloading 72 of its stations in 27 markets to comply with Federal Communications Commission rules limiting the number of stations that can be owned by a single operator.
Clear Channel announced the divestiture of the stations the second week…
The annual CEDIA show is mostly about home theater and whole-house entertainment systems, but high-performance audio often gets a share of the limelight, too.
Marantz took advantage of this year's gathering in Indianapolis to unveil a new line of universal disc players capable of full multichannel output from both DVD-Audio discs and Super Audio CDs. Due to arrive at dealers in October, the company's new top-of-the line disc spinner is the DV-9500, an approximately $2100 machine said to be the company's first with "upscaling HDMI output and full DVD-Audio/SACD bass management."
The…