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Several class-action lawsuits have been thrown against the music industry in the wake of its admission that it engaged in a price-fixing scheme known as Minimum Advertised Pricing, or MAP. The policy arose as a response to widespread CD price wars in the early 1990s that drove prices of some CDs below $10 each, and was intended to prevent mass-market merchandisers from offering CDs below cost as lures to pull customers into stores. The MAP policy was officially discontinued after the Federal Trade Commission reached a settlement with the industry in May of this year.
Bill Leebens and Ole Lund Christensen, organizers of the Audio Asylum Asian Tsunami Victim Support Auction, announced today that the fund-raising drive will end Monday, February 28.
"We've raised roughly $50,000 to this point," said Leebens, "and we hope to have a big finish. The audio community has been amazingly supportive, but we think it's time to wrap up our effort."
Industry donors included ACI, Argento Audio, Atma-Sphere, Audio Note, Audiovector, BAT, Bottlehead, Cain & Cain, Grado Labs, Gryphon Audio, HHG Stands, Kimber Kable, Kubala-Sosna, Locus Design, Luminous Audio,…
One of the themes of the 2005 CES, which we touched on in our first day's coverage, regarding Thiel's new version of its best-selling PowerPoint loudspeaker, is the increasing importance of the custom-install market to manufacturers best known for their two-channel products.
Nevada-based Bohlender-Graebener, for example, produce well-regarded "traditional" speakers—their Radia 520i speaker was reviewed by Larry Greenhill in the December Stereophile—but the company's big product introduction at the Show was a pair of on-wall custom-install speakers. The R-17i (held in the photo by BG…
Upstart digital audio format MP3 received some heavy-duty validation with the announcement on Wednesday, April 27 by Thomson Multimedia SA that it has made a 20% investment in MusicMatch Inc., a maker of MP3 player and management software. "Jukebox," as the software is known, is used to play, encode, and manage MP3 files. Thomson makes RCA, ProScan, and Thomson brand electronics.
The investment was seen by many industry observers as an indication of MP3's growing importance and potential as a consumer audio format. A compressed music-file format (whose full acronym stands for Motion…
T+A adds tubes and analog to SACD: German high-end manufacturer T+A has announced its new, tubed, $9500 D10 SACD/CD player. The D10 incorporates many of the same components found in the company's SACD 1245R, including the disc mechanism and DAC However, the D10 contains two more powerful power supply sections, a toroidal transformer with a secondary switching section for its digital parts, and a high-voltage mains section with 100,000µF of reservoir capacity for its analog tube stage.
The D10 boasts eight D/A converters, four per channel, in symmetrical push-pull mode. T+A's American…
When audiophiles speak of "imaging," they may not be using the term metaphorically. Recent research at the University of California at San Diego's School of Medicine indicates that hearing and vision are more closely related than had been previously thought.
Experiments described in the journal Nature seem to prove what stage directors and filmmakers have long known: that sounds can enhance the ability to see things clearly. "We found that what people hear significantly influences what they see," said lead researcher John McDonald. His team investigated the responses of 33 volunteers,…
Last week, CDDB announced a newly designed, more user-friendly website for its large database of audio CD information. The database resource now provides free information on more than 360,000 CDs, which the company describes as the world's largest online CD music database. There are over 40,000 entries in the classical CD database alone, with rock logging three times as many entries at 126,000. The database gains about 500 new entries every day. Users can search by artist, album, or song title, and then cross-reference titles to other artists or discs.
Ann E. Greenberg, CDDB senior…
The most common complaint about record companies: CD prices are too high. In fact, many blame Napster's runaway success on the insistence of "greedy labels" on pricing discs at $15 or higher. Apparently BMG Direct, a division of BMG Entertainment, has put two and two together and found it equals $9.99.
Last week, the company announced that it has launched OnePriceCDs, a new website that BMG claims offers more than 12,000 CD titles from a variety of music genres for a single price of $9.99 each, and multi-unit CD sets at $8.99 per CD. All prices include shipping and handling.
But is…
Robert Deutsch warms up the Audiopax Model Eighty Eight monoblock power amplifier to hear what famed Brazilian designer Eduardo de Lima has to offer. Deutsch notes, "The Audiopax Model Eighty Eight represents the latest refinement of de Lima's thinking about power amplifiers."
Next, J. Gordon Holt gets his hands on the Audio Research SDP1 multichannel music processor. Holt exclaims, "For those of us who have succumbed to the enticements of surround sound for music, Audio Research's SDP1 is both vindication and cause for rejoicing."
Starting in 1968, JGH began his relationship with…
In August, the future looked cloudy for Sirius Satellite Radio, Inc. Despite the eventual commercial promise of satellite radio, the startup suffered from massive debt accrued during its development and from a slow initial subscription rate. Company officials had discussed a possible bankruptcy filing if additional financing couldn't be found.
The clouds parted for the company on Thursday, October 17, with a stock move that raised approximately $200 million in cash–enough to keep it operating through the second quarter of 2004.
A "recapitalization" agreement orchestrated by Sirius…