The first annual Surround Music Awards (SMAs) took place earlier this month at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills. The ceremony, hosted by Grammy Award winners Al Schmitt and Ed Cherney, recognized winners in 15 categories, including the first ever Surround Pioneer Award, to engineer Elliot Scheiner. Scheiner…
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With the advent of Dolby Digital, DTS, DVD-Audio, and SACD, multichannel audio and its enthusiasts are not lacking for playback formats. What has been lacking, however, is recognition for outstanding achievements in the fledgeling surround music business. But not anymore.
If a recent announcement by the nation's largest radio broadcaster is any indication of a trend, independent music promoters may be on their way to extinction.
On April 8, Clear Channel Communications announced that it would not renew deals with "indies," as independent music promoters are known in the business, when current agreements expire this coming summer. Should other broadcasters follow suit, by this time next year the music industry's relationship with radio could be permanently altered. San Antonio–based Clear Channel has approximately 1200 stations.
The independent…
John Atkinson asked "What's that noise?" He wasn't referring to the piano that Robert Silverman was playing for Stereophile's recording, Concert, but rather to the sound of candy wrappers in the concert hall. The recording survived the crackling ordeal, but the lady with the wrapper did not. JA relates the entire story, and also serves up additional details about the making of the double CD set.
Back in 1996, in one of his first reviews for Stereophile, Michael Fremer wrote about the ever-popular Audible Illusions Modulus 3A preamplifier. As Fremer wrote at the time, "more than 15,000…
The number of two-channel Super Audio Compact Discs seems to grow by the week. There are now several hundred titles to choose from—and hundreds on the way, with the recent endorsement of the format by major record labels. Even so, there are still very few SACDs that exploit the multichannel capabilities of Direct Stream Digital.
Chesky Records hopes to change that. The audiophile label has announced four new SACDs recorded in multichannel surround sound. They are Bucky Pizzarelli's Swing Live, David Johansen's David Johansen and the Harry Smiths, Christy Baron's Steppin', and Chuck…
DVD-Audio and SACD are offering record companies a chance to re-release their back-catalogs of "classic" material once again. But the results will not necessarily resemble the CD re-releases of the last two decades. Artists, producers, and labels now have an opportunity to go beyond the standard "re-mastered for (insert new format here)" process when updating an older title for DVD-Audio or SACD. For better or worse, they can entirely remix the master tapes for multi-channel surround sound.
DTS says it is doing just that for its re-release of Queen's 1975 classic A Night At The Opera as…
There may be thousands of audio manufacturers around the world, but there are only a handful of ways for them to sell their products. These include your traditional bricks-and-mortar dealer network (everything from small audio boutiques to mass-market chains), the online or mail order retailer, direct sales via the Web or catalog, or direct sales via a company store.
Although it has been put to successful use by mass-marketers such as Bose and Sony, the last approach has rarely been seen in the high-end audio business—until Red Rose opened shop in front of the Whitney Museum in New York a…
Everyone claims "CD-quality" sound over the Internet these days, but the reality always seems far short of that promise. As a result, work continues to develop an encoding scheme worthy of the CD-quality title. Recently we reported on developments at AT&T regarding the a2b format, and both Liquid Audio and RealNetworks compete on a weekly basis to grab headlines for their audio technology announcements.
Thus, we read with interest news coming out of MIT about their new approach to sound processing, called "Structured Audio," that is to be incorporated in the new MPEG-4 international…
No one knows what online music services may ultimately look like, but new models continue to pop up for consumers to test-drive.
One of the latest is MusicNow, a collaboration between Clear Channel Radio and FullAudio Corporation. Launched April 17 in conjunction with Clear Channel's five radio stations in Phoenix, Arizona, the service lets subscribers download 50 songs per month from a station's website for a fee of $7.99 (the "Gold Plan"), or 100 for $14.99 ("Platinum"). New subscribers must submit credit-card numbers to complete the sign-on procedure; a three-day "free trial" period…
Enhanced Compact Discs (ECDs) are one of a host of hybrids and mutations popping up in the garden of digital infotainment. Many ECDs have added biographical text, still pictures, short video clips, and garish graphics to bulk up the content of basic music CDs. Others provide links to fan clubs, to an artist's website, or to the record label's home page. Most such efforts could be categorized as "art for art's sake"---experimental projects undertaken without any clear idea as to how the finished product will be used. "Value added" is usually the justification, but rarely the result.
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More good news for budget-conscious audiophiles who are waiting for that all-in-one universal high-resolution audio player: Yet another chip manufacturer is announcing a decoder IC that will allow new DVD machines to untangle just about any audio file format. Last week, LuxSonor Semiconductors joined the growing list (see previous) of chip manufacturers that are including both DVD-Audio and SACD in one package.
LuxSonor says its new Intrada DVD chip (LS2010) combines standard DVD decoder technologies, new audio decode formats, new advanced video technologies, and back end analog components…