Offerings will increase weekly, a company announcement stated. The purpose of the experiment is to de-bug the…
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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.
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…
Have you ever been to a rock concert and come away mumbling, "Those engineers must be deaf"? After enduring three hours of an all-out sonic assault, you were probably just a tad cranky, but the facts are that those engineers probably were deaf, or well on their way.
That's the sobering conclusion of a seven-year study of hearing loss among music and audio professionals conducted by the House Ear Institute (HEI) in Los Angeles. Data gathered from hundreds of screenings at music and audio trade shows since 1997 reveal a consistent pattern of "high-frequency hearing loss from noise-induced…
From 2000, Brian Damkroger checks out the seductive Oracle CD player, commenting, "I couldn't help but wonder if the Oracle's sonic performance would be as unique and spectacular as its looks."
The January 1999 Stereophile saw Kal Rubinson listening to a pair of disc spinners. First he auditions the Arcam Alpha 9 CD player and writes, "There are as yet no 24/96 CDs, and it's unlikely that there ever will be. So, what can justify the inclusion of a 24/96 DAC in a CD player?"
Next, KR reviews the California Audio Labs CL-20 DVD-V/CD player, noting, "At a price of $2495, the CL-20 sits…
Retail prices of compact discs are likely to drop in the coming months, thanks to a Federal Trade Commission action ending an industry-wide price-support policy begun five years ago. On May 10, the FTC announced that it had reached an agreement with the "Big Five" of the music business—Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Music, Seagram Ltd.'s Universal Music, Sony Music Entertainment, BMG Entertainment, and EMI Group PLC—that will effectively end the practice of "minimum advertised pricing" (MAP) instituted as a response to music-retailing price wars in the mid-1990s. Under MAP, retailers were…