George Reisch opines that there are three topics to set the sparks flying at the audiophile dinner table: sex, religion, and speaker cables. Reisch decides to tackle that last contentious item in Illuminated Cables &…
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To balance or not to balance? That is the audio question that Martin Colloms sets out to answer in Balance: Benefit or Bluff? Although balanced capability is a fashionable feature in many expensive audio products, Colloms writes that "the High End could be paying dangerous, costly lip service to the received wisdom that balanced operation is the goal for an audio system."
DVD-Audio proponents, ranging from record labels execs and mastering engineers to CE manufacturers, staged a press event on August 9 at Dolby Labs in Los Angeles in the hopes of rekindling interest in their format, which has been quietly trying to launch for the last year or so. Warner Bros Records has gone so far as to call this current effort a "re-launch", but after spending over four hours with the DVD-A folks, this reporter thinks there's a good chance we may be seeing yet another official launch once most of the current issues (detailed below) are sorted out.
Curiously, there was no…
Could this be a record executive's dream come true and the end of the need for watermarking as we know it? CantaMetrix has announced the further development of a new technology, MusicDNA, that the company claims is capable of identifying and tracking the billions of existing as well as new MP3 files on the Internet and providing an exact accounting for the copyright, "thus enabling legal file sharing and linking value-added data to songs."
CantaMetrix also announced that, in order to develop MusicDNA, it has secured its second round of financing from two European venture capital groups,…
In his review of the Cary Audio Design CAD-572SE monoblock power amplifier, Martin Colloms explains, "It's no accident that low- and zero-feedback triode technology is now the mainstay of the Cary amplifier line." MC then reports on whether or not this approach has succeeded. RObert Deutsch adds some further thoughts.
From January 2004, Keith Howard describes in The Law of Averages, how to squeeze high-resolution sound into a low-resolution carrier like the compact disc. As KH notes, "The best in CD sound quality has improved sufficiently for some to question whether we need the new media…
Recently, the New York Times announced the "lease" of its AM radio station, 1560kHz on the dial, to Disney/ABC for the next 8 years. Why is this important?
In the early 1930s a certain John Vincent Lawless Hogan, radio inventor, began an experimental television station. When he was not experimenting with TV he played classical music over his station. Eventually the TV experiments faded into history, but his classical music station, the first in the country to be devoted entirely to the format, prospered. In the late 1930s it was bought by the New York Times.
"XR" stood for…
Home Entertainment 2006 is only days away, taking place June 1–4 at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel in Los Angeles, CA. Attendees will find a wide variety of special events, product demonstrations, and entertainment options throughout the show.
•Hundreds Of Audio/Video Exhibitors Everyone from AAA Audio to ZVOX will be there with live demonstrations and company representatives. This is the biggest gathering of A/V products under one roof available to consumers anywhere.
•Live Audio/Video Seminars A wide variety of free seminars will be available, including: the infamous…
Audiophiles almost universally agree that hearing—or "auditory perception" to neuroscientists—improves with practice. That phenomenon would explain why many of us are able to hear differences between audio components that untrained listeners can't hear.
To our dismay, and sometimes, discredit, few scientific studies of this learning process have been conducted or published. By-the-book engineering types frequently dismiss audiophiles' assertions that they can hear minute differences that are imperceptible to most people, a situation that has fueled one of the most contentious and long-…
Every autumn, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) publishes its "Five Technologies to Watch" list of "technology trends poised to shape the consumer electronics industry" in the year ahead. Most of the choices may seem obvious, but the final entry on the list this year may be a surprise for audiophiles.
Geared toward industry professionals, "Five Technologies to Watch" provides a comprehensive analysis of each trend named and its impact on the consumer electronics market. Each of the five technology sections details the strategic issues, market forecasts, consumer perspectives, key…
Last month, we reported that audio engineers with a yen for magnetic tape were hoarding their remaining stockpiles in the wake of the Chapter 11 restructuring–inspired shutdown of the Quantegy plant in Opelika, Alabama. What a difference a month makes! Two new sources have come to the rescue.
Here in the States, there's, ATR Magnetics, a division of ATR Services, a company best known for refurbishing and updating studio-quality Ampex magnetic tape recorders. Actually, ATR Magnetics was created in response to the 2004 closing of the Munich BASF/AGFA manufacturing facility. The plan was to…
Several recent surveys on the Stereophile website have uncovered a surprising trend among audiophiles: Many of you are heading online to both used- and new-product vendors to make equipment purchases that have traditionally been made at specialty audio retailers.
While more consumer choice is almost always a good thing, it does put more pressure on smaller dealers, many of whom barely sneak into profitability each year. Our polling also reveals that audiophiles are increasingly willing to go out on a sonic limb to find components, with a whopping 68% of respondents saying that they have…