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Blows Against the Empire

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has lost a couple of important rounds in its fight against file sharing.

On December 19, a US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overturned a previous ruling by a trial judge ordering Verizon Communications to reveal the identity of an Internet subscriber suspected of illegally trading music recordings. On the same day, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that makers of file-sharing software Kazaa cannot be held liable for copyright infringement of music or movies traded by its users.

In the US case, Verizon had appealed an…

Group Claims RIAA Does Not Speak for All Musicians

The Recording Industry Association of America has recently been getting press ink by the bucketful for its defense of the music business against the perils of the Internet. But the Future of Music Coalition is urging the US Copyright Office to be wary of efforts by the RIAA to establish itself as the sole and exclusive collection agent for digital performance royalties for sound recordings. Instead, the Coalition has proposed that an independent body would be a more appropriate vehicle to collect and distribute these and other monies, including Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 royalties.

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Added to the Archives This Week

Flat frequency reponse in an audio component is good, right? Well, maybe not always, explains J. Gordon Holt in Down With Flat! JGH: "Many times in past years I have been impressed by the incredible flatness of the measured high-end response of some speakers. . . . In every such case, I have been equally amazed at how positively awful those loudspeakers sounded—so tipped-up at the high end that I could not enjoy listening to them."

Next up is Michael Fremer's review, from June 1999, of the Sonus Faber Amati Homage loudspeaker. Fremer claims that this design is Sonus Faber designer…

HE2003 Seminars Announced

Show attendees at Home Entertainment 2003, the hi-fi and home-theater event of the year, will be treated to nearly a dozen educational seminars to help guide and inform them about what and how to buy the new and sometimes confusing home audio/video and home theater products available today.

As technology rapidly changes, consumers need to stay up-to-date and be armed with the right information. HE2003 will help unravel the mysteries with a variety of interactive seminars on subjects including "Custom Installation," "HDTV," "Super Audio CD," "Well-Tuned Rooms," "Why DLP?" "Surround Sound…

2005 CES: More Day Four

As an audiophile manufacturer, the odds are stacked against you getting a great sounding demo up and running under show conditions. The rooms are generally skimpy and oddly shaped, the construction materials and walls unpredictable, and there's the need to set up fast with only what you've thought to pack in.

Yet, many displays overcome these obstacles to become an oasis of transcendental audio bliss. Partially hidden at the back of the St. Tropez, in a group of large demo rooms called the "Golden Section" by show organizers, was just such a room. I was invited in to one of these rooms by…

2004 CES: Day Two

The format battle over what goes into your audio player's disc drawer could soon be rendered moot. Forget SACD and DVD-Audio: it's the format war taking place on your desktop that may determine the real future of audio. And, believe it or not, audiophiles might win, too.

We sat down with David Caulton, the group product manager for Microsoft's Windows Digital Media Division, to discover what was behind the Windows Media Audio logos that are starting to pop up on consumer electronics gear (such as the new Pioneer Elite multichannel receivers), and also learn how the future for high…

DVD-equipped computers take over the world!

Digital Versatile Disc (DVD)---the well-publicized successor to VHS tapes, compact discs (CDs), and CD-ROMs---will struggle in the video and music industries, but be a major success for the personal computer industry, according to a recent report from Forrester Research. The report concludes that PC manufacturers will rapidly embrace DVD, resulting in an installed base of 53 million DVD-equipped PCs by 2002.

The next five years will prove less favorable for the video and music industries' DVD efforts, however. In 2002, only 5.2% of US households will own a DVD-Video player, while only 2…

European Commission Looking into MusicNet, Duet

The European Commission isn't especially fond of joint ventures by international media conglomerates. Last year, the EC successfully squashed a proposed merger of EMI and Warner Music Group on the grounds that WMG's parent company, AOL Time Warner (then simply Time Warner), combined with the UK's biggest name in music, would create "a virtual monopoly" of the European music market. A few months later, merger discussions between EMI and Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) similarly went nowhere. EC investigators also looked into price-fixing in the European CD market early this year.

Now the…

Added to the Archives This Week

Kalman Rubinson gives a long listen to the 1998 Stereophile Editor's Choice winner, the Z-Systems rdp-1 digital preamplifier. Like many audiophiles, Kal eschewed tone controls in favor of the purist approach—until he met the rdp-1. As he puts it: "Now, the time has come for DSP to give the audiophile some powerful tools to tailor frequency response and to correct faults in the recording."

While he was reviewing the rdp-1, Kal Rubinson also put the NAD 118 digital preamplifier under the sonic microscope. He writes: " . . . they differ in terms of capabilities, intended applications,…

Industry Update

Linear buys Sunfire: Following its acquisition of Imerge and Niles, Linear, LLC, a division of Nortek, Inc. has acquired Sunfire Corporation, manufacturer of high-end amplifiers and speakers. No details of the deal were disclosed, other than to say that Bob Carver "will remain with Sunfire."

Hafler no more: Recent visitors to Hafler's website have been greeted with the following notice:

"Dear Hafler Enthusiasts,

"Hafler Professional products are no longer being manufactured.

"If you are in need of product information, specifications or owners manuals, this website is fully…