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Two-channel lives: Once the bread-and-butter of electronics retailers everywhere, the two-channel receiver has become all but extinct. Rotel America is making a valiant effort to save this endangered species with its new RX-1052, a remote-controllable 100Wpc unit claimed to offer "audiophile-grade sonics"—it includes a phono preamp, and a "massively overbuilt" power supply—with versatile four-area multiroom/multizone capabilities and basic video-switching features. Whole-house system integration is made easier via three IR links and 12V trigger outputs. An RS-232 interface connects to…
It was announced this week that Hans Fantel, a founding editor of Stereo Review and long-time consumer electronics columnist at The New York Times, died in early May from injuries sustained in a automobile accident.
Mr. Fantel led a fascinating life. He spent his boyhood in Vienna and escaped to Czechoslovakia after his father, an opponent of German rearmament, was arrested. He then served in the Czech underground before moving to New York in 1941.
Mr. Fantel was a man of great culture. He wrote a book about the Strauss family, The Waltz Kings, as well as William Penn: Apostle of…
A month after news of Apple Computer's start-up subscription music service, reports began circulating that the company was negotiating to buy Universal Music Group, the dominant player in the global music market. The rumored buyout, first reported April 10, was variously quoted at $5–6 billion. The discussions between Apple and UMG may have been blown out of proportion; by April 12 the New York Times was suggesting that Apple might invest in UMG, but was in no position to make an outright acquisition.
Apple has already licensed UMG's catalog of recordings for sale to users of its soon-to-…
There's a basic rule that explains the audiophile's role in the audio food chain: The mass market accepts and then audiophiles perfect. Try to reverse that rule with something like, say, SACD or DVD-Audio, attempting to have sound quality drive mass-market adoption, and you get . . . the DualDisc.
With the obvious mass-market success of Apple's iPod portable, it would follow that smart audiophiles would want to make it better. One company taking that route is PsiberAudio, the brainchild of Andrew Conley.
PsiberAudio has just introduced its first two products aimed at the iPod tweaker…
Don't bother to tell Music Lovers Audio that audio sales have slowed. At a time when many dealers have abandoned two-channel audio altogether or chosen between de-emphasizing music and calling it quits, this Bay Area audio retailer has opened a second store a mere 30 miles from the original North Berkeley location, across the Bay in San Francisco.
Despite having heard advance hype that Music Lovers' new San Francisco store is one of the five best retail audio outlets in the nation, I was unprepared for what I encountered. The huge lobby, which extends much of the length of the…
Many audiophiles are incensed that the digital outputs on high-resolution disc players are limited to the 16bit/44.1kHz standard of the "Red Book" CD when playing DVD-Audio discs. To read some postings on audiophile newsgroups, you'd think it's a massive conspiracy to prevent people from adding their own processors to the playback chain. Putting as many boxes as possible in an audio system is a constitutionally guaranteed right, isn't it?
The lack of such digital outputs is because electronics manufacturers have caved into demands by the music industry to block the availability of…
Last week, RealNetworks announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Xing Technology, a developer and provider of MP3 software. Xing has been developing standards-based digital audio and video encoding and decoding technology since 1990, but eventually ran into trouble competing with other Internet-audio startups such as RealNetworks and Liquid Audio.
RealNetworks will acquire Xing in exchange for common stock in RealNetworks with a maximum value of $75 million. The acquisition is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 1999, with RealNetworks…
Chad Kassem is a true audio renaissance man. For years he has headed Acoustic Sounds, supplier of select recorded musical treasures from a variety of audiophile and specialty labels. Kassem also has his own label, Analogue Productions, which produces reissues, revivals, and a series of original recordings under the label APO Records.
It is his love of traditional blues that drives APO's roster. It also inspired Kassem to purchase an old church in Salina, Kansas and get into the recording studio business, back in 1996. Six years and nearly $1 million of renovations and equipment…
The music goes round and round: An investment group led by former Universal Music chief Edgar Bronfman, Jr. is in the lead to acquire Warner Music Group (WMG) and Warner/Chappell Music Publishing from corporate parent Time Warner, according to reports issued the third week of November. Bronfman's group—a consortium of banks and venture capital firms—has offered $2.8 billion for Time Warner's musical properties, possibly forcing prior suitor EMI Group PLC to drop out of the bidding. On Thursday, November 20, EMI chairman Eric Nicoll told reporters that Time Warner had informed his company of "…
In the age before recordings, music was a service business. Composers wrote for their patrons, and musicians performed for money. In the days since Edison's inventions, music has become a commodity business in which record companies stockpile large inventories and attempt to move them into the market of music lovers through a dense network of distributors and retailers. For established artists, the service aspect of music---playing for pay---now exists primarily to support the commodity business. For developing artists, public performance is a form of self-promotion to aid the search for…