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.
… 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.---JIThe "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.…
It has been an interesting week on the download battlefront. On Friday, online file-sharing service BearShare announced that it was shutting down its business. The P2P company, along with its operators Free Peers, Inc., agreed to the terms of a $30 million settlement with the recording industry. As part of the settlement, Free Peers agreed not to start any other unlicensed music services, and the company has agreed to sell BearShare's technology, rights, domain name, and user data to iMesh, Inc. (footnote 1)
iMesh paid the RIAA $4.1 million in a 2004 file-sharing settlement, but went back…
You can't stop progress—especially at Texas Instruments. The Dallas, TX–based technology giant has introduced a new two-channel digital audio amplifier chip with the world's best specifications.The TAS5015 is the world's first 192kHz/24-bit digital amplifier capable of a dynamic range of 110dB measured at the speaker. The 48-lead thin quad flatpack (TQFP) chip can drive speakers directly with up to one or two watts of output power, but is better used as a controller for a dedicated output stage, says the company's digital audio marketing manager Niels Anderskouv. The TAS5015 supports "…
A quarter-million dollars' worth of recording and duplicating equipment and hundreds of thousands of counterfeit compact discs and cassette tapes were just part of the booty seized by New York's Suffolk County police in what has been called the "biggest bust of bootleg music in US history." Twelve people were arrested in raids during the first week of September at warehouses in Manhattan, Queens, and Long Island.Police found more than 300,000 blank CDs, and millions of CD and cassette labels. Musical genres included "pop and Latino performers," according to police. Recording-industry…
Johnny Cash, the 71-year-old American icon, died September 12 of respiratory failure caused by complications from diabetes. The singer/songwriter had been released from the hospital the preceding day after a two-week struggle with an unspecified stomach ailment.Cash had been in ill health for several years, suffering also from autonomic neuropathy, a disease of the nervous system, as well as pneumonia. Yet, his final days were spent in a burst of creative energy that would have put a younger, healthier man to shame. His most recent album, American IV: The Man Comes Around (Universal/…
