The announcement was made by Ervin S. Duggan, PBS president and chief executive officer, at the semiannual Television Critics Association press tour at the Ritz Carlton Huntington…
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The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and Warner Bros. Records announced January 8 that they have entered into a five-year record and television program funding partnership. The arrangement launches the PBS Records label, a new venture that will fuel the production of PBS performance programs and companion recordings. In addition, PBS Records will present music soundtracks from major PBS nonfiction series.
SACD and DVD-Audio have brought multichannel music back into the mix for many audiophiles. However, without an official digital connection standard in place, consumers must contend with multiple cables and then find a preamp designed to manage the analog signals and send them to various amplifiers.
As any audio purist will note, the best way to do that is leave the signal in the analog domain. And, many tube fans contend, the best way to do that is via tubes. Enter the Fosgate Audionics limited edition FAP V1 vacuum-tube surround processor, due to ship in September.
FA describes…
The dawning of the age of inexpensive universal DVD-Audio/SACD/CD players may finally be upon us. Cirrus Logic recently announced the introduction of their CS4392 integrated circuit chip, which the company describes as a high-performance Crystal digital/analog converter that "delivers unrivaled sound quality while providing manufacturers a cost-effective solution for next-generation DVD-based audio products including DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD (SACD) players."
Cirrus says that the CS4392 will cost manufacturers only $2.80 each in OEM quantities, and will be shipping before the end of the…
Job cutbacks are one inevitable result of sustained sales declines. In late March, the ailing music industry began to shed excess workers in an effort to reach profitability, with Sony Music and Bertelsmann Music Group announcing significant reductions in their workforces.
On Friday, March 28, Sony Music Entertainment began laying off about 1000 employees, including workers in sales, manufacturing, and distribution. The cutbacks are part of a restructuring initiated by the company's new chairman and chief executive, Andrew Lack. The former president of NBC took the helm at Sony Music in…
Like the proverbial camel who took over the tent after getting just his nose in, it appears that once copy protection is given an inch, it will inevitably try to get in all the way. At least that's how it appears with an increasing variety of CD copy protection systems now currently being tested en masse by the major record labels. Latest to announce a new "evaluation agreement" is BMG Entertainment, which will use and evaluate SunnComm's MediaCloQ "digital content cloaking technology", first put to the test earlier in the year on a Charley Pride CD (see previous).
SunnComm claims that…
Drummer Billy Higgins started his remarkable career backing up R&B musicians such as Amos Milburn and Bo Diddley around the LA area before embarking on his jazz path with the Jazz Messengers (led by Don Cherry and saxophonist James Clay) and Dexter Gordon. But it was his association with Ornette Coleman, starting in the mid 1950s, that electrified the jazz world and made him a force to reckon with. His first recordings, with Coleman and Red Mitchell, were released in 1958. In 1959, he performed with both Coleman in New York and Thelonious Monk in San Francisco, and from that point on,…
One of the more popular monthly columns in Stereophile these days is Jonathan Scull's "Fine Tunes." To keep our online readers fit and tweaked, we are going to be adding Scull's columns to the online Archives section on a weekly basis, starting with the first column he wrote for the magazine, back in July 1998: "Fine Tunes #1." "I think I just got 2000 bucks' worth of difference," writes a reader about the value of the advice contained in J-10's first installment.
We dig a little deeper into the vault to unearth a seminal and oft-requested 1990 piece by J. Gordon Holt: "Tweaking Your…
The online music world has been hit by one jolt after another as the record labels go after anyone they can slap with the "music pirate" label. In response, the e-sharks smell blood and are circling. Internet music-distribution company EMusic sent out a press release recently making the assertion that "now that Napster and MP3.com are both on shaky legal ground, many downloadable-music fans are going to be looking for compelling, 'legitimate' alternatives."
But what makes EMusic believe that Napster fans, notorious for being college-age freeloaders, are going to want to grow up and go…
Spring typically sees Stereophile release its coveted "Records To Die For" feature, wherein everybody working for the magazine gets to make like a music critic and add their two cents about what gets them excited (musically speaking). R2D4 2000 is on newsstands right now, in the February issue of Stereophile; to commemorate its publication, we add the 1999 "Records To Die For" to the online archives.
Also this week, Jonathan Scull attacks the dreaded ground loop in "Fine Tunes" #10. Here's how J-10 concludes his primer: "I believe we can now say that you have a basic grounding in this…
Digital audio took another lurch forward at Comdex '97 with the display of Yamaha's FireWire-to-PCM converter technology.
Two product mock-ups were shown, both with 1394 (FireWire) connectors providing the means for moving digital audio between components. In a modest display, a multidisc CD changer was tethered to a middle-of-the-line Yamaha A/V surround-sound receiver via a single 1394 cable. More important, the FireWire jacks on the back of these components were the only connectors present for propelling audio, the exception being the speaker output posts on the receiver.
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