Slaughter describes the Lone Star group, called the Dallas Audio Association, as "a new concept in cooperation within the high-end audio industry. We will be providing public education on various audio topics, including how to listen, how to set up systems…
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These are perilous times for the independent audio dealer. With customers being siphoned off by large megastores and, eventually, the Internet, success will favor the dealer with a few clever tricks up his or her sleeve. One of those tricks for dealers in Dallas, Texas is a new group formed by Stephen Slaughter of The Audio Consortium.
Is there really a benefit to those pointy feet you have? Jonathan Scull has been surfing the Internet for cone-footer tweaks and theories and reveals his latest haul of hot finds in Fine Tunes #32.
NHT released its flagship model 3.3 several years back to great acclaim. But at $4000/pair, the price and size of the speaker were a bit much for many audiophiles. As Tom Norton notes: "Enter the NHT 2.9 loudspeaker. It resembles the 3.3 to a remarkable degree, offers much of what the larger loudspeaker does, comes in a more manageable size, and costs a lot less money." Norton works hard to…
The musical road less traveled leads to places like New York's Downtown Music Gallery. If your taste in music lies somewhere outside the marketing-demographic bell curve, DTMG has tunes for you: live tunes, recorded tunes, strange tunes, bargain tunes. There's something for almost everyone at recently launched www.dtmgallery.com---from Classical to Klezmer to Progressive Jazz to World Music to Absolutely Uncategorizable.
Besides announcements of DTMG-sponsored live performances by an eclectic assortment of musicians, the site lists the catalogs of the Avant, Tzadik, DIW, Canterbury, and…
The June issue of Stereophile, which hits newsstands this week, spills some ink on the 30th-anniversary reissue of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon as a two-layer Super Audio CD (Capitol CDP 582136 2). Jon Iverson nominated the disc as June's "Recording of the Month," while I mentioned it in my "As We See It" column. This "fully loaded" SACD includes both multichannel and two-channel mixes encoded with the DSD system on a high-rez SACD layer and a two-channel "Red Book" transfer (16-bit word length, 44.1kHz sampling) on its CD layer.
Jon wrote at length about the audible differences…
Apple Computer is riding a wave that shows no sign of breaking.
On March 6, the Cupertino, CA–based computer pioneer celebrated its highest stock price in over three years, closing at $26.75/share on the Nasdaq exchange, an increase of 25% since January 1, buoyed by the popularity of Apple's iPod portable music player and the company's iTunes downloadable music service, and by an unconfirmed rumor of a takeover bid by Sony Corporation.
In February, Apple reported that it had received 100,000 preorders for the new iPod mini. The $250 player went on sale February 20, but some customers…
John Atkinson finishes his survey of pricey floor-standing speakers with a review of the Dynaudio Confidence C4 loudspeaker. JA notes that, "despite its $16,000/pair price, the C4 has much in common with its cost-no-object cousins in Dynaudio's Evidence line."
Next, Robert J. Reina tries the Polk Audio LSi7 loudspeaker, which "just scrapes the $1000/pair ceiling of my self-imposed 'affordable speaker' price bracket." As Reina discovers, "Life is full of trade-offs, especially among affordable speaker designs."
Analog fanatic that he is, Michael Fremer is always searching for the…
Classical music fans will be happy to hear that Image Entertainment has announced the signing of an exclusive license agreement with England's Reiner Moritz Associates (RMA) that will see the company releasing 50 classical-music programs on DVD in the coming year. In addition to the classical performance programming, Image will also release some of RMA's special-interest fare, featuring such luminaries as Marilyn Horne, Maria Callas, David Hockney, Jackson Pollock, and Margot Fonteyn.
Among the RMA works that Image plans to release on DVD are a production of Richard Wagner's Lohengrin…
Internet audio file-sharing service Kazaa is the music industry's pariah—and it wants artists to get paid for their work.
Kazaa has teamed up with telecommunications giant Verizon to propose a system of compulsory Internet copyright licenses that could generate as much as $2 billion annually from Internet service providers alone. Proceeds from the licenses could be used to compensate performers and songwriters who currently get nothing for the sales of their creations by music industry-backed commercial sites pressplay and MusicNet.
"We're proposing the idea of a copyright compulsory…
According to the latest figures from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the month of August showed positive gains in the overall factory sales of audio products to dealers. The CEA reports that sales for the month rose six percent compared to the same period last year, resulting in year-to-date sales of $5.3 billion, an 11.2% rise over last year.
The CEA says that even though sales of home receivers dipped slightly in August (six percent), other categories within separate home audio components experienced double-digit growth. Within this sector, the CEA reveals that CD equipment…
Almost beaten to death in the past couple of years by salesfolk, pundits, and journalists, "convergence" has been applied to the coming-together of audio and video, analog and digital, hardware and software, information and entertainment, and Democrats and Republicans. Among all these merging trends, the audiophile community rarely hears about the convergence of pro audio with the High End.
That's because so few companies have ventured outside the narrow niches of their self-defined markets. Only a couple of loudspeaker makers, such as JBL, have anything resembling a tradition of working…