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Jim Shannon Joins Quartet Marketing

At CES2006, we were pleasantly surprised to encounter Jim Shannon in Quartet Marketing Group's exhibit room at the Alexis Villas. "What are you doing these days?" we asked. He gestured around the room. "I'm a partner in Quartet," he said. "I've been here since July."

Why are we always the last to know?

Shannon brings formidable experience to Quartet. He began working for New England Audio Consultants in New Haven, CT, where he became familiar with the then-new Mark Levinson Audio Systems, before starting his own high-end store in North Hampton, MA. He later joined Madrigal as West…

Gracenote's Growth

If you've ever hunted for a song title or a performer's name on the Internet, you've probably used CDDB, the Compact Disc Database.

Operated by Berkeley, CA–based Gracenote, CDDB is the world's largest online database of CD album information, enabling music fans to access information about recordings by album or song titles, genre, or artist. The company's continually updated server computers contain information on 1.4 million albums encompassing 18 million songs, and are accessed each month by approximately 30 million users.

On June 17, Gracenote announced a plan to expand its…

A Busy Week for the Online Radio Biz

Last week saw a flurry of announcements in the online audio and video streaming business, capped off by Yahoo!'s acquisition of Broadcast.com. Yahoo! says it has signed a definitive agreement with Broadcast.com whereby Yahoo! will issue 0.7722 of a share of Yahoo! common stock for each share of Broadcast.com common stock. In addition, all outstanding options of Broadcast.com will be converted into Yahoo! options. The acquisition is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 1999 and is valued at around $5.7 billion, including $4.8 billion in Broadcast.com common stock and $900…

Because There <I>Is</I> a Difference . . .

Conventional wisdom has it that, compared to men, few women express much interest in consumer electronics, and especially audio equipment. In fact, according to Consumer Electronics Association statistics, women accounted for only 22% of the $81 billion spent on consumer electronics in 1999. Prognosticator Jupiter Communcations predicts that, in spite of this, women will account for 46 million online buyers by 2003, and will overtake men in online purchasing.

Online retailer Hifi.com took note of this phenomenon and spotted an opportunity. According to a national survey conducted by the…

Feeling gruvi

While some are trying to push the quality of paid music downloads up, others are pushing in the other direction. SanDisk, primarily known for flash memory cards used in portable devices like digital cameras, is launching "gruvi," described as "the first removable flash memory card of its type to be sold with premium music content."

Yes, this is yet another new format for buying music aimed at replacing the CD, and the first release in this new medium is the Rolling Stones' A Bigger Bang from EMI Music's Virgin Records. The Stones' gruvi album will hit the streets next month on a SanDisk…

Athena Hits the Big Time

Having a great product at a fair price is mandatory practice in the ever-competitive audio business. But getting the word out and placing those products in front of the customer is just as critical—some might argue, even more important. If this is true, then Canadian speaker company Athena has just made the score of a lifetime.

Last week, Athena Technologies announced that it has entered into an agreement with Best Buy Stores to market the Athena Audition and Point 5 speaker systems through Best Buy's more than 500 retail stores in the United States starting in April. Athena adds that…

Recordable CD News

Recordable CD machines are nothing new these days, especially those aimed at the PC market. Those machines that find their way into Desktop PCs can end up doing everything from backing up corporate financial data to mastering CD-ROM titles. Many are used for recording music CDs as well, and so a new CD-Recorder from Smart and Friendly has a couple of features thrown in just to excite the audio folk.

Working with Tracer Technologies, Inc., Smart and Friendly will be including a full-scale version of Tracer's Diamond Cut Audio Restoration Tools 32 with the new CD Rocket 8x CD-Recorder.…

Instant Audio Replay?

It's not uncommon for bootleggers to record live performances of favorite artists and then send copies of the tapes around the world. But in an interesting twist that could add a whole new dimension to concert merchandising, the Virgin Entertainment Group and Liquid Audio recently teamed up to record a live performance by the Joshua Redman Quartet at the Virgin Megastore in San Francisco. The recording was then immediately digitized and burned onto CD.

Virgin says that the more than 150 jazz enthusiasts who attended the one-hour event were entered into a raffle to win one of the 12…

2002 "Recommended Components"

The release of our 2001 Recommended Components online last month was such a success, we now offer readers the opportunity to buy the 2002 "Recommended Components" from both the April and October issues as .pdf files.

Folks seeking "Recommended Components" issues often find them out of stock at the newsstand or missing from our available back issues list. For example, the April 2002 RC issue has been sold out for months.

As a result, just as we did for 2001, we've put together a year's worth of the 2002 RC features in a single bundle for sale via our secure e-commerce pages. Every…

DVD-Audio News

DVD-Audio is getting a boost from several directions.

On August 20, Digital Theater Systems (DTS) and EMI Music announced a joint venture to create and distribute new surround-sound versions of music recordings from various EMI labels on a worldwide basis. The new titles will be created by a DTS production team and will bear a "DTS Signature Series" logo, the announcement stated. The series will include "some of the top artists from EMI's catalog, as well as future releases, and will be distributed globally by EMI."

DTS Entertainment vice president Jeff Skillen described the…