One of the more controversial additives, "watermarking," is a process whereby data that defines permissions for a digital music track is mixed in with the music. Digital audio playback…
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In the perfect digital future, audiophiles would be able to drink from the purest of high-resolution audio datastreams with no worry that someone upstream had polluted the current. But in the real world, content providers and hardware manufacturers increasingly conspire to dirty the flow a little and limit unauthorized consumption by controlling the technology needed to filter out their toxic additives.
Several news sources reported Saturday, January 22, that Time Warner is close to completing a merger with EMI Recorded Music. The combined company will be worth an estimated $20 billion, making it the world's second-largest music conglomerate, exceeded in size and scope only by Seagram Ltd.'s Universal Music. News of the deal came less than a week after the announcement of an impending merger between America Online, the world’s largest Internet service provider, with Time Warner, one of the world's largest media conglomerates.
The deal has been in negotiation for a long time, preceding…
If you own a Sonic Frontiers product, rest assured that parts and service will be available for it well into the foreseeable future. Sonic Frontiers International---the front company created by Paradigm after it acquired the apparently struggling maker of high-end amplifiers, CD players, disc transports, and DACs at the end of August---will honor all valid SF warranties, and will support the existing network of dealers and distributors, according to an announcement made two months ago.
If you are owed money by Sonic Frontiers, get in line. You may have to wait a very long time for payment…
The largest advertising and promotional campaign for an audio product in Sony Electronics' (and possibly anyone's) history debuted during NBC's Thursday-night prime-time television lineup last week. The campaign, titled "Make it with MD," featured various celebrities as they moved through a Hollywood party sporting a small MiniDisc personal stereo unit playing their own personalized music mixes. Sony also plans major cable, billboard, print ad, and promotional tie-ins.
Sony first rolled out the MiniDisc technology several years back as a recordable digital replacement for the cassette…
Kalman Rubinson says he "anticipated the installation of the TacT Audio RCS 2.0 digital equalizer/preamplifier with mixed emotions." Would his hard work at setting up the perfect listening environment be rendered irrelevant in the face of digital signal processing? Or would the future of audio unfold at his feet?
In a related feature, Rubinson profiles and uses the ELAC Technische Software CARA 2.0 computer program, which attempts to model the properties of your listening room before you commit the big bucks. Even better than the real thing? Rubinson investigates.
Michael Fremer…
We begin with a January 1993 article from Robert Harley called The Jitter Game. RH explains, "Clock jitter is a serious and underestimated source of sonic degradation in digital audio. Only recently has jitter begun to get the attention it deserves, both by high-end designers and audio academics."
From his December 1990 "As We See It," Harley discusses Digital Sound and a groundbreaking paper presented to the AES by Dr. Roger Lagadec. "Dr. Lagadec challenges the conventional wisdom that requantizing a digital audio signal with a digital fader produces only a change in level accompanied by a…
In one of his old comedy routines, Steve Martin imagines himself hauled into court for bank robbery. He seeks dismissal of the charges on the grounds of forgetfulness. "Your Honor," he pleads, "I forgot that bank robbery was a crime."
That sort of forgetfulness seems widespread and persistent in the music industry. On Tuesday, May 4, several major record labels and music publishers agreed to pay approximately $50 million to settle an investigation by the New York State Attorney General's office into unpaid royalties for thousand of recording artists. Among the list of underpaid performers…
US Senator Joseph Biden has introduced a bill that would give law-enforcement agencies stronger tools to pursue copyright violators, and would give copyright holders stronger grounds for suing pirates.
Intended to shore up holes in present copyright law, the bill, approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, July, 16 criminalizes copying not only of copyrighted content but also of the packaging that contains it. The bill makes it a crime to copy music, movies, and software, and to counterfeit "authentication devices" including watermarks, holograms and packages, and covers both…
Some say it dates back 50 years, to when the late David Hafler introduced a tube amplifier with a "better-sounding" ultralinear output stage. Others claim it goes back to the introduction of electrical recording and playback in 1927, when Gramophone magazine's founder and editor, author Sir Compton McKenzie, thundered that electrical reproduction was a step backward in sound quality. But whenever it started, the "Great Debate" between "subjectivists," who hear differences between audio components, and "objectivists," who tend to ascribe such differences to the listeners' over-heated…
Unit sales of CD players rebounded in 1998, rising 4% to $336 million, according to statistics from the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association. All segments of the CD hardware market---single-play, carousel changers, and mega-disc changers---improved over the big slump of 1997, when unit sales fell 60% and dollar sales fell 40%. Through November 1998, single-disc player sales were up 33% in units and 24% in dollar volume. Carousel changers, component-CD's largest segment, rose 15% in units and 7.5% in dollars during the first three quarters of 1998.
What might look like good news…