This year's Macworld Expo, held January 11–14 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, wasn't simply devoted to the latest twist on Mac OSX or tutorials on Photoshop CS. Approximately 40,000 Apple faithful paid $40 each to ogle the newest products from Apple and others in the same hall that had hosted the Audio Engineering Society's convention just a few months earlier.…
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The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas is not the only major electronics event held in early January each year. Apple Computer and allied companies throw their own specialty shindig more or less concurrently.
Advances in audio reproduction typically proceed with tiny steps that, in time, add up to major systemic improvements. In this industry, quantum leaps in basic technology rarely happen. DiAural Doppler decoding may be one of them.
Five weeks ago we reported that Ray Kimber, of Kimber Kable fame, and his financial partner, Bruce Bastion, were in the process of bringing a new loudspeaker technology to market. DiAural, as they've named the technique, is claimed to eliminate what Kimber calls Doppler-encoding distortion---the modulation of high frequencies by low frequencies of higher…
Feeling grumpier about spending audio dollars this holiday season? You may not be alone according to a new survey of consumer holiday buying intentions.
The NPD Group reveals that the 2004 holiday shopping season could be challenging for retailers. "Nearly 9 out of 10 consumers say they are planning to spend the same amount or less than last year," say the researchers. That breaks down as follows: 69% of American consumers indicated they plan to spend the same amount this holiday as last year; 18% plan to spend less than last year; and 12% plan to spend more. On average, consumers tell NPD…
Questions for music lovers: 1) Have you been racking your brain trying to remember who recorded Ruby Vroom? 2) Do you know how many Tim Hardin recordings are available on CD? 3) Which album featured Head East's "Never Been Any Reason," considered by some connoisseurs the greatest rock song ever?
Answers: 1) Soul Coughing. 2) 22. 3) Flat as a Pancake. If you knew these off the top of your head, you probably don't need an online database. If you didn't, you might want to click over to cddb.com and do a little exploring. CDnow, which bills itself as the "World's Largest Music Store," ties…
The US music industry is fighting a war on several fronts—industrial piracy in foreign countries, casual piracy in the States, unhappiness among consumers, and disagreements with artists (see related story).
On March 19, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) lashed out at industrial piracy in China, a phenomenon that it claims costs it $600 million a year. Efforts to persuade Chinese authorities to crack down on pirates have yielded few results, RIAA chairman and CEO Hilary Rosen told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington.
"Piracy in China for…
Remember that whole "broadcast flag" kerfluffle? Well, it ain't over yet—not if the Home Recording Rights Coalition (HRRC) and the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) have anything to say about it. If you don't remember the broadcast flag imbroglio, or if you thought it had been vanquished by the DC Circuit Court in May 2005, here's an update.
The broadcast flag was "content protection" (aka digital rights management or DRM) that would insert a "do not record" signal into copyrighted broadcast material that all commercially available recording devices would have to honor. In other words,…
If you think the name Viola Audio Laboratories sounds familiar, wait 'til you hear the names behind it: Tom Colangelo, Paul Jayson, and Tony DiSalvo—all former officers at Cello. Viola, working out of Cello's former New Haven facilities, is now producing a complete line of electronics, from the $18,000 modular Spiritu preamp to the $12,000 Bravo Double Set monoblock amplifier. The company also manufactures audio cables and a modular loudspeaker, the $18,000/pair Allegro, as well as an $18,000 subwoofer, the Basso. The system certainly is elegant-looking, and it sounded impressively…
Clear Channel Communications, Inc. has settled the first of what could be a long string of lawsuits over its purportedly monopolistic marketing tactics.
On June 3, the San Antonio–based radio and concert giant settled a suit brought in 2001 by the Denver-based independent concert promoter Nobody in Particular Presents, Inc. (NIPP) that accused Clear Channel of "monopolistic and predatory practices." NIPP charged that Clear Channel withheld radio play of musicians who signed contracts with other concert promoters and refused to advertise non–Clear Channel concerts on its radio stations.
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Dolby Laboratories was demonstrating its new Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) consumer encoder, which the company says complements its professional AAC encoder, at this year's New York AES Convention. Dolby says it will license the encoder to enable "high-quality AAC encoding" for CD-rippers, hard disk–based jukebox products, Internet-based music distribution systems, portable players, and other digital audio products aimed at the consumer market.
According to Dolby, AAC perceptual encoding technology delivers digital audio quality "far superior to MP3" while requiring approximately 30% less…
Editor's Note: I received an e-mail from Leonid asking for advice on audio cables a few weeks back, and we quickly began discussing the local audio scene in his hometown in Russia. I asked him to describe it for me; what follows is his report.---JI
The "Great Land"---clear air for hundreds of miles, and, in winter, a big river flowing under the nearby ice. A city of one million people that extends from the river's bank out across the hills. This is the Russian city of Saratov, located 600 miles from Moscow on the eastern bank of the river Volga, which, near the city, is 1.8 miles wide.…