John Atkinson celebrates 15 years at the helm of…
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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.
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…
Recording artists may soon have improved health care coverage, should an historic agreement be ratified by members of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA).
On Monday, September 29, the union's national board of directors unanimously approved a tentative agreement with the music industry's "Big Five" (BMG, EMI Music, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group) and sent it on to the union's Health & Retirement Funds board of trustees and to the general membership for ratification. The agreement would make available health care…
We were saddened to learn that the great jazz organist Jimmy Smith died in his sleep on February 8. He was 76.
On January 7 this year, Smith was designated a National Endowment of the Arts Jazz Master, although, in truth, the NEA lagged severely behind legions of fans when it acknowledged Smith's musical mastery.
A few jazz musicians played the organ before Jimmy Smith—Fats Waller and Count Basie, for example—but the way Smith played, it sounded as though he had invented the instrument. In a way, he had. Smith played the Hammond B3 like no one before him. He played walking (…
The courtship between two music-retailing giants is over. CDnow and Columbia House have decided to call off a merger that had been in discussion since last summer. The official explanation from executives close to the deal was a sharp decline in Columbia House's profitability over the past several months.
The announcement came in mid-March among news of declining interest among investors in new e-commerce ventures. The marriage of the music retailers had been delayed by prolonged regulatory investigation following the announced merger of Time Warner and America Online. Columbia House is…