Noting "It's been an eventful year so far," the statement recaps the findings of a recent NARM focus group and suggests that a key area of concern for music retailers should be fostering better consumer communication. "What became pretty clear was that even though the value proposition [for buying music]…
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In other news this week, the music business is in a tailspin, and searching for ways to save itself. The National Association of Record Merchandisers (NARM) has just published its chairman's message, with several clues about what consumers may see from the industry in the coming months.
Your dauntless reporters---Tom Norton, Steven Stone, Michael Fremer, Bob Deutsch, Larry Greenhill, Jon Iverson, and Barry Willis---have shown up on schedule for Philips Electronics' 1999 kickoff press conference at the Desert Inn's Grand Ballroom II, attended by a hundred or so other journalists.
Philips always offers the opportunity for schmooze in abundance, in addition to some delicious munchies and non-alcoholic daiquiris, and plenty of new and improved hardware---the first of which to catch our collective eye was a fine pair of CDR-765 dual-bay CD-dubbing machines, their drive trays…
As Michael Fremer puts it, "In analog, it's the little things that count, and Rega's upgrade of the basic Planar 3 design to the Planar 25 can only be described as visibly 'small.' But the sonic improvements I heard during my first encounter with the $1275 arm/'table combo were audibly big." Fremer takes a close look at and listen to the Rega Planar 25 turntable for Stereophile readers and attempts to reveal all of its secrets. Sam Tellig adds his two cents' worth.
"Triode, Silver!" exclaims Chip Stern in his review of the Legend Audio Design Starlet integrated amplifier from December 2000…
Imagine that you are a Canadian with a mid-sized accounting business. You have tons of data to keep track of, and have found the recordable CD to be an excellent form of storage: convenient, reliable, and cheap---until New Year's Day, when the cost of blank discs suddenly doubled. You may not have the slightest interest in music, but one of your basic costs of doing business has just skyrocketed because someone, somewhere, has allegedly made an illegal copy of a commercial music CD.
Canada's new levy on recordable media, including DATs and cassettes, is the result of persistent lobbying…
Audio equipment manufacturers want as few restrictions as possible when designing new products. Audio content providers, on the other hand, seem hell-bent on locking down any music you buy tighter than Fort Knox.
An uneasy truce between the manufacturers and music industry results in components that are more cumbersome than necessary (no universal digital outputs on a SACD or DVD-A players), have limited options for use (copying restrictions that run counter to Fair-Use laws), and are generally not what the customer wanted.
The result can be sluggish equipment sales, and a…
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) may spend the rest of its associated life in litigation—as either as the initiator or the recipient of actions intended to determine who can use its products, under which circumstances they can do so, and how much they should pay, assuming they are allowed to use them.
Having recently issued more than 1000 subpoenas to suspected online music pirates, the recording industry trade group received one itself on Wednesday, August 27. A suit filed in federal court in San Francisco by a group of Internet music broadcasters charges the RIAA with…
It's five years from now. Wide bandwidth has made audio-on-demand as commonplace as ATM machines and cellular phones were in 1999. Music lovers can plug into the Internet from almost anywhere and download any tunes they wish to hear anytime they wish to hear them for only pennies per song. Portable devices the size of wristwatches contain entire libraries of music. Picture frames, computer screens, and ceiling tiles all double as loudspeakers. Intuitive programs suggest personal playlists based on databases of prior requests. People are awash in a sea of music.
And yet, vinyl records…
Launched with a bang last April, Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store has steadily gained popularity with music fans, but it won't reach its projected goal of selling 100 million songs online within its first year.
iTunes has sold 50 million songs over the Internet since its inception, the Cupertino, CA–based computer pioneer announced March 15. At the current rate of 2.5 million songs a week, Apple should have sold "70 million to 75 million songs" by the end of April 2004, according to CEO Steve Jobs.
iTunes were selling briskly back in September, at the rate of 500,000 a week, rising…
The compact disc has given rise to all sorts of questionable accessories: magic pens with green ink, reflective stickers, rim dampers, absorbent mats, spindle weights, cleaners, buffers, polishers, and demagnetizers. It's amazing how many products are needed to make perfect sound perfect.
To that ever-growing list of panaceas, you may wish to add a fungal inhibitor—especially if you live in a tropical region. After receiving several reports of CDs rotting in the hot, humid countries of Central America, Spanish scientists have isolated a fungus belonging to the Geotrichum family that…
One of the great things about the DVD-Audio format is the sheer flexibility built into the standard: two-channel or multichannel (mixed for four, five, or six speakers), multiple resolutions, multiple encode/decode choices (MLP, Dolby Digital, DTS, PCM), and an assortment of special features, including video.
But that very panoply of playback options can easily confuse customers about what any specific disc might offer. Home-theater fans know all too well that there is no labeling consistency concerning widescreen formatting or even the type of surround-encoding on a disc.
If DTS…