But are flea-market operators responsible for knowing which vendors' CDs are pirated and which are legitimate? Yes, says the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which has taken an aggressive stance, suing the owners and operators of the markets for copyright infringement. The trade organization adds that this move is taken only…
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Visit any major metropolitan city, and chances are you'll eventually stumble upon vendors selling pirate CDs from outdoor tables, often for as little as $5 each. But for the suburban resident in the US, flea markets are where the pirate action is.
After months of wrangling, the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) has announced its first set of standards for portable digital music devices. Manufacturers can now incorporate these standards into the designs of new products. Many industry observers believe that portables will be the next big wave in consumer audio, expected to hit the market by the winter holiday season.
In a July 13 announcement, the SDMI, a cross-industry consortium, emphasized that the standards are "voluntary." New SDMI-compliant devices will play all types of digital music, including "legacy" MP3 files. As…
Kalman Rubinson didn't expect to complete a full review of the Revel Ultima Studio loudspeaker, planning instead to investigate only the company's F30 (also available in the online archives). But after the Studios ended up spending several months in his home, there was only one honorable option available: 'fess up and submit his true feelings.
Brian Damkroger says he has happily listened to the evolution of the fabled Magnepan loudspeakers for two decades, and was eager to get his hands on the company's Magneplanar MG3.6/R. But does this latest Magnepan loudspeaker hit as high a mark as…
Real businesses are moving into territory explored by the upstarts. On August 2, Universal Music Group, the world's largest record label, announced that it will begin offering, on a trial basis, digital downloads of recordings from its massive catalog. The experiment is scheduled to begin this week, with an initial offering of about 60 songs from artists in several genres, including operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti, jazz guitarist George Benson, and pop band Blink 182.
Offerings will increase weekly, a company announcement stated. The purpose of the experiment is to de-bug the…
Sam Tellig and Lonnie Brownell both provide trenchant analyses of the Bryston B-60R integrated amplifier. Tellig notes, "With Bryston gear, you get solid engineering and impeccable—I was going to say unimpeachable—build quality. This is what you pay for; not bulletproof faceplates, gold-plated name badges, or the like."
Next we have a Wes Phillips Audio Power Industries Power Wedge Ultra 116 power conditioner. Phillips writes: "Considering that not that long ago there wasn't even a product category for balanced AC line conditioners, we seem to now enjoy a plethora of the critters." WP then…
Several months back, Stereophile editor John Atkinson asked David Rich to investigate the technical merits of SACD. With Super Audio CD: The Rich Report, DR discovers that there is both more and less than meets the ear to the new format, including why it is being promoted in the first place.
Then John Atkinson takes a look at the new format with Super Audio CD—One Year Later. JA finds himself analyzing the CD, SACD, and DVD-Audio product launches to gain a little perspective on what is going on in the higher end of the music and audio businesses.
Everybody knows that Michael Fremer…
John Atkinson gets his mitts on the PSB Platinum T8 loudspeaker and remarks that "talented loudspeaker engineers do not stand still, and neither do the resources and technology available to them." Does PSB's new flagship design live up to JA's expectations? All is revealed.
Next, Art Dudley waddles the Tannoy Dimension TD12 loudspeaker around his listening room to find the perfect sweet spot and finally sits down to listen. Also included: A short history lesson on the company and its "dual concentric" driver designs.
In his As We See It from November, Noise Pollution, Jim Austin notes…
Two top executives at Bertelsmann Music Group will depart in the wake of the company's recent settlement of its lawsuit against Napster. Citing irreconcilable differences with parent company Bertelsmann AG over company strategy, BMG chief executive Strauss Zelnick and chairman Michael Dornemann announced their resignations Sunday November 5.
Zelnick will leave on January 1; Dornemann will depart on July 1. Fifty-seven-year-old Rudi Gassner, a music industry veteran with more than 30 years' experience and a former BMG international operations executive who resigned last January, will…
The past year has been a busy one for Hilary Rosen, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). She suffered a humiliating defeat at England's Oxford Union Debates, celebrated new agreements with Silicon Valley companies, and led her organization in the attack on file-sharing service Kazaa. Rosen and the RIAA have also attacked college kids and put pressure on universities to police their students.
Rosen claimed her group would now go after Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in its battle against file trading. Speaking at MIDEM (Marche International du Disque, de l'…
In a never-ending quest to control what it believes is an epidemic of piracy, the music industry in recent years has gone after Internet file-sharing startups, fly-by-night CD duplicators, foreign pirates operating on an industrial scale, college kids with too much time on their hands, and street-corner vendors hawking badly-duped cassettes. At times the anti-piracy campaign has reached the fervor of a witch hunt, with blame laid on the innocent as well as the guilty.
Almost all of the industry's enemies have been outsiders. That's what's so unusual about a lawsuit filed in early April in…