Acoustic Dreams—This high-end loudspeaker manufacturer will introduce several new products at the Home Entertainment Show, including newly redesigned VAIC reference-level mono tube amps, exclusive "level-integrated" amps, new VAIC speakers, and the exciting Lumen White WhiteLight…
search
Home Entertainment 2001 arrives at the Hilton Hotel & Towers in New York this week for three days, May 11-13. There will be more than 80 rooms stuffed with the latest high end audio and video gear, including dozens of brand new products. For more information about the show, go to the HE 2001 website.
Audio nuts with a sense of humor and an interest in art will enjoy the works by sculptor Alan Rath currently on display at the Haines Gallery in downtown San Francisco.
Rath uses common audio devices---12" and 15" woofers, Kevlar-cone midranges and tweeters---some DC-pulse amplifiers, and an assortment of other industrial materials to construct science-fiction creatures with bulging eyes and heaving bodies. His Thumper V, resembles a huge snail on wheels, its body and eyes pulsating at sub-audible rates.
Some of Rath's creations recall vegetative forms of life, like a group of "…
It is shaping up as one of the big battles of the 21st century: content owners (who are not necessarily the artists who create content) versus the consumer electronics industry. On the one hand you have Hollywood with its record companies and the RIAA, and on the other, the manufacturers of products and technologies that facilitate the manipulation and use of digital content.
The Consumer Electronics Association, which represents technology manufacturers, is looking to defuse the conflict, urging the content community to work with, not against, the technology industry in the critical area…
Last week, Verance announced that the US Patent and Trademark Office has issued them a new patent intended to prevent the disabling of a watermark on recorded content. The patent is entitled "Method and Apparatus for Preventing Removal of Embedded Information in Cover Signals." The company has recently drawn the ire of audiophiles, who claim that its watermarking methods are audible in high resolution media such as DVD-Audio recordings (see previous report).
The company says that the patented technology involves a new method of protecting "transactional" watermarks. Verance explains that…
The entertainment industry is going the last mile in its war against file sharing. On Friday, October 8, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) appealed to the US Supreme Court to overturn a lower court's ruling earlier this year that peer-to-peer (P2P) file-trading networks can't be held liable for copyright infringement.
Hoping to have the case heard in the current session, the plaintiffs filed a 46-page petition seeking the reversal of a finding by the 9th US Circuit…
Using personal computers to listen to music may be heresy in some audiophile circles, but the practice is definitely on the rise. Recognition of the fact has led at least one maker of computer motherboards to introduce a model with a vacuum-tube audio circuit.
In June 2001, in our weekly online poll, we asked readers, "Do you ever listen to music on your computer?" At the time, 29% replied "Yes, quite often," and 30% replied, "Yes, once in a while." The same question posed a year later yielded 37% who said "quite often" and 24% who said "once in a while." In both cases, 2% of our…
With two new high-rez audio formats on deck, is a CD-only player still relevant? John Atkinson listens to, and then measures, the Classé CDP-10 CD player to discover why it sometimes takes 20 years to perfect a format.
Paul Bolin then wires up the Aesthetix Rhea phono preamplifier, musing that "trickle-down technology is a grand thing," when it leads to "a tubed phono preamplifier of exceptionally distinguished lineage."
Next, Kal Rubinson surrounds himself with multichannel components and recordings for "Music in the Round #2." KR profiles the McCormack MAP-1 multichannel analog…
Bringing old albums out of the vaults and onto the market as CDs is a pretty standard process these days. First you get the licensing straightened out, find the original cover art, and locate the first-generation master tapes. In a pinch, the safety copies of the masters can be used, but if these also can't be located, what next?
Burn a CD master from a vinyl LP of course.
Waves, a company that develops and markets audio signal processing software for the pro-audio and multimedia markets, is releasing next month its new "Restoration" software bundle, which the company claims will…
One of the more compelling live demonstrations at last year's 2001 Consumer Electronics Show was in the room at the Alexis Park hosted by Australia's ClarityEQ. As reported last year, using a $350 pair of NHT Super One speakers driven by mass-market consumer gear, the company's PDC-6.6 DSP correction system noticeably improved the midrange tonality and imaging we were hearing each time it was switched into the circuit. This prompted us to give the company the "proof of concept in a hotel room" award for that year.
ClarityEQ was back in the Alexis Park at the recent 2002 CES, and announced…
More consolidation in the audio biz: D&M Holdings, owner of Denon, Marantz, McIntosh Laboratory, ReplayTV, Rio, and Escient, took another big gulp last week and made a move to acquire Boston Acoustics.
Boston Acoustics was founded in 1979 (interestingly enough, not in Boston, but in Peabody, Massachusetts), and quickly found success in the home loudspeaker market, creating such classic bookshelf designs as the A70 and the diminutive A40. In the late 1980s, the company expanded into the car-audio and custom-installation markets and then on to OEM design and manufacturing. In recent years…