Online retailer Hifi.com took note of this phenomenon and spotted an opportunity. According to a national survey conducted by the…
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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.
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…
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 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.…
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…
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 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…
Mark Levinson has traveled from Woodstock to the Whitney, and Michael Fremer lends an ear to his Red Rose Music R3 loudspeaker to determine if the journey was a fruitful one. As Fremer characterizes it, "If Levinson's Cello foray was haute monde, Red Rose is Dockers: loose-fitting and relaxed."
Next we have Robert Deutsch examining the Wavelength Audio Gemini monoblock power amplifier. Tube designers are a devoted lot, and as Deutsch reports, none is more devoted to the art than Wavelength's Gordon Rankin.
As a bonus this week, we add Kalman Rubinson's May 2001 Follow-up to his…
The MP3 audio format has been rapidly gaining a solid reputation in the last several months. Portable products such as Diamond Multimedia's Rio have hit the market, and websites (typified by MP3.com) have gained financial success. (See related story.) But one area that has so far lagged is MP3-based playback and recording equipment for using the files at home without moving a computer next to the stereo.
Lagged, that is, until last week. At the MP3 Summit99 conference in San Diego, ReQuest announced the AudioReQuest, a stereo component resembling a CD player that the company says can…
Like it or not, audiophiles may find that it will be the computer industry, not the traditional consumer electronics manufacturers, that creates a successful platform for high resolution audio. As we reported last week from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Microsoft's latest Windows Media Audio (WMA) codec contains provisions for up to eight channels of 96kHz/24-bit lossy or lossless PCM audio—and Apple OSX fans have had an operating system that supports 96/24 for some time.
Now Intel is officially getting into the act. The company's next generation audio specification,…