The European Triode Festival (formerly Århus Triode Festival) claims to be Europe's leading event for do-it-yourselfers in audio, and notes that last year's show saw participants from around the planet, including Germany, Switzerland, Austria, France, Poland, the…
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Tube fans might want to get their passports in order. We've received word that the European Triode Festival 2004 (ETF.04) will take place in Langenargen, Germany in December. The festival, which describes itself as "a gathering of tube audio hobbyists and professionals," says it will host participants from all over the world.
And then there were four: Sony's music division and German media company Bertelsmann, parent of the BMG record label, have decided that they've got a better chance under one roof. Last week, the two companies revealed that they will merge their music divisions into a new company called Sony BMG.
The merger follows the resignation last month of Bertelsmann board chairman Gerd Schulte-Hillen, who opposed the deal. The Sony BMG announcement also comes nine days after Edgar M. Bronfman and his son Edgar Bronfman, Jr. officially resigned from Vivendi Universal's board of directors following an…
Blaming a falloff in CD sales on the popularity of CD burners, BMG Germany recently issued approximately 100,000 copy-protected discs in an attempt to thwart the problem—and had to take a substantial portion of them back because consumers said the discs wouldn't perform in car players and in some home audio systems.
The discs were put out for sale in German music stores the last week of January, and about 4% of them bounced back almost immediately, with complaints from customers. "The consumers started getting back saying it doesn't play on car CD players and several types of normal…
Brian Damkroger finds that, while struggling unsuccessfully to fit the Conrad-Johnson Premier 17LS line-stage preamplifier into his preconceived notions of the company and its products, a paradigm shift in his thinking occurred. Damkroger explains that "it was only during a marathon session of listening and comparing the C-J to a couple of other preamps that the truth dawned on me . . . I went back and forth between the C-J and the other units several times over the course of the next week, and one evening it hit me." The truth awaits.
John Atkinson celebrates 15 years at the helm of…
Little noted by the mainstream media, technology companies are pushing ahead with research and development programs for high-resolution audio. Two announcements in late April indicate that neither DVD-Audio nor the Super Audio CD is a passing fancy.
On April 24, Novato, CA–based Sonic Solutions announced a partnership with Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (MEI) that will integrate a DVD-Audio authoring system developed by Matsushita into Sonic Solution's DVD production system. Panasonic's parent company, Matsushita is one of the founding members of the DVD Forum and helped develop…
Karmazin joins Sirius: The satellite radio service gained some serious traction in its recent acquisition of former Viacom, Inc. president Mel Karmazin. Just one month after signing "shock jock" Howard Stern to a multimillion-dollar contract, Sirius signed Karmazin to a five-year contract, bringing him in as its new chief executive officer. Joseph Clayton will relinquish the CEO title but remain chairman of the board. Karmazin departed Viacom in June and began discussions in earnest with Sirius after the satellite service landed Stern, in a move Karmazin described as "brilliant." Karmazin…
A move by RealNetworks to cut the umbilical cord between Apple's iPod and the company's iTunes Music Store has raised the ire of some execs in Cupertino. The computer pioneer is threatening legal and technical retaliation against its Seattle rival in the wake of a late July launch of a digital music technology called Harmony that enables the iPod to work with downloads from RealNetworks' music store.
In a press release, Apple claimed that RealNetworks may have violated provisions of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by reverse-engineering the iPod to make it compatible with…
Let's try to imagine the ideal music-buying landscape from a record company's point of view. As distasteful as this may seem to an ever-growing legion of unhappy audiophiles and music fans, it can go a long way towards explaining why the major labels appear to suddenly be at war with their customers.
They remember a time, before the Internet and MP3, before the very first CD recorder even, when they were able to hobble the slightest hint of a consumer digital recording format, such as DAT, with a copy restriction system like SCMS. With standards for consumer DAT tied up in committees and…
The Swedes have found a new way to kill time on those long, cold Scandinavian winter nights. On February 7, Swedish Radio (SR) announced that it had begun multichannel test transmissions from the Sirius 2 satellite, utilizing DTS's Coherent Acoustics compression/ decompression algorithm. The tests are intended to run until the end of April 2003.
SR says the 24-hour, "free-to-air" broadcasts are being transmitted across Europe using both the Nordic and European beams of the Nordic Satellite AB (NSAB) Sirius 2 satellite (5 degrees East), on 12,245.34 MHz Vertical and 12,379.60 MHz…
In hopes of stoking the multichannel DVD-Audio engine, Burr-Brown announced last week the PCM1604 audio digital-to-analog converter, which they describe as a high-performance, 6-channel audio DAC featuring 24-bit capability and 192kHz sampling, for use in a "wide variety of multichannel audio applications."
The company says that the PCM1604 contains six 24-bit/192kHz DACs combined on a single monolithic integrated circuit and sporting a 105dB dynamic range and –95dB THD+N on each of its six channels. According to Burr-Brown, the internal digital filter operates at 8x oversampling (96kHz…