With the August 2000 issue, Stereophile bids farewell to its home of 22 years, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and, like Ma and Pa Kettle, packs up the wagon (with cats and dog) and heads for the bright lights and big city. John…
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When a manufacturer makes extraordinary claims about a product, the result is sometimes an extraordinary review. That's what happened when Jonathan Scull examined the Richard Gray's Power Company 400S AC line conditioner last June. His report raised a chorus of reader and industry reactions, all of them included here along with some additional unpublished observations.
For years, we've seen attempts to disguise loudspeakers as paintings. A pair of announcements last week highlights the ongoing drive within the consumer electronics industry to find new ways to hide speakers within other objects.
NEC is introducing what it is calling the world's first personal computer equipped with an LCD monitor that also functions as a speaker. The company says it will start shipping the new machine for the Japanese market starting this week.
The new laptop comes with a 17"-wide LCD screen that delivers video and also generates sounds, "creating a theatrical…
"Size does matter," John Atkinson discovers, as he fits the Shure E3c in-ear headphones into his ears. Once fitted, JA hooks the mini "cans" up to his iPod and PowerBook to discover how much audiophile sound a little set of ear buds can produce.
Art Dudley notes in "Listening #17" that "literally everything in the DNM 3-C preamplifier that isn't meant to conduct electricity is made of plastic." AD listens to the 3-C as well as the DNM PA3-S power amplifier to uncover the sonic attributes of the company's uncommon designs.
Kalman Rubinson takes two multichannel disc players for a spin…
Music fans are mourning the passing of swing era giant Lionel Hampton. The vibraphonist, band leader, and multi-instrumentalist died August 31 at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan of complications from age and a recent heart attack, according to his manager Phil Leshin. Hampton was 94.
A percussionist who was adept at both drums and piano, Hampton was the first major jazz musician to master the vibraphone, an electronic instrument based on the marimba and the xylophone, an instrument he had played as a student. His "flamboyant mastery" of the vibes, in the words of the New York…
In Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, the evil overlord's favorite torture was to introduce carnivorous worms into the ear canals of his prisoners. No one who saw the film can forget the agony of the victims, who gradually went insane as the worms ate through their brains.
Khan's hideous little creatures are not unlike the annoying snippets of pop songs that get lodged in your head and won't go away—so much so that German music fans have adopted the term "ohrwurm" (earworm) to describe the phenomenon.
Recently a Dartmouth research team applied the tools of science to this universal malady…
The last week of July was a busy one for music-industry attorneys—and, by some measures, a successful one. As almost everyone in the world is aware, on Wednesday, July 26, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) won a round in its fight against Napster, a San Mateo, California–based software company that enables the sharing of MP3 music files over the Internet. On that day, in a US Federal court in San Francisco, Judge Marilyn Patel decreed that the widespread sharing of music using Napster was a form of wholesale copyright violation, and ordered the service shut down effective…
Music lovers who availed themselves of MP3.com's uploading-archiving-and-accessing services are about to become the next target market for the music industry. Nearing the end of protracted litigation brought against it by the music industry's "Big Five," the online music venture has announced a marketing service that will promote new commercial recordings directly to its users through e-mails. The recordings will be on labels under the control of MP3.com's opponents in the year-long copyright wrangle.
The first sample to go out to MP3.com users will be "Free," a song by the rock band Vast…
Analog playback equipment, the high art of 20th century audio, will be the theme of the "Analog Ballroom" in the Regent Parlor on the 2nd Floor of the New York Hilton during Home Entertainment 2001.
Show-goers will have the opportunity to see exquisite examples of equipment from European, Japanese, and American manufacturers, including Aesthetix, Avid, Basis, Koetsu, Musical Surroundings, Rega, Transfiguration, and others—many of the analog world's elite, all in one room. The display will celebrate more than 50 years of refinements in turntable, tonearm, and cartridge designs.
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Pure technology developments don't often have an audiophile angle, but a February 9 announcement from InPhase Technologies caught our attention.
The Longmont, CO–based data storage specialist is now shipping what it calls the "first blue laser holographic media," which it claims is capable of storing 14 hours of high-definition video or 1500 hours of audio on a single disc. Developed with financial aid from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the Tapestry HDS5000 (presumably, "HDS" stands for "high density storage") is intended for use in what InPhase calls "holographic…
Sony Music Entertainment and Bertelsmann Music Group could soon be one.
On November 6, in the first of what may be several such consolidations in the music industry, the two giants announced their intention to merge. Should the deal win regulatory approval, the combined entity would be managed by two former television executives, with Sony's Andrew Lack serving as chief executive officer and BMG's Rolf Schmidt-Holz serving as chairman of the board of directors. Lack joined Sony Music last year after a long stint as an executive with NBC television. In his few months at the helm, Lack…