SACD and DVD-Audio may be getting all the format news these days, but here's an interesting statistic: sales of vinyl so far this year total 661,000 units, trouncing the 234,000 units sold by DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD combined. The vinyl collectors market is also hot, and VRD's…
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Vinyl junkies who missed the first official Vinyl Record Day celebration last summer should mark their calendars for Saturday, August 16. On that date, the faithful will again converge in San Luis Obispo, CA's Mission Plaza to gawk at LPs, memorabilia, vintage gear, and to meet classic album cover notables.
On February 18, Harman International Industries Inc. announced that it had signed two licensing agreements with New Transducers Limited (NXT) relating to NXT's flat-panel loudspeaker technology.
Under the first agreement, Harman acquired the exclusive rights to sublicense the UK company's NXT technology to home audio and professional audio companies based in the United States. US-based companies seeking to license the NXT technology in any of these fields will now have access only through Harman International.
The addition of the NXT technology to Harman's current intellectual…
Tom Dowd, a recording engineer and producer who created some of the greatest pop, jazz, and rock recordings of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, and who ushered in the era of multi-track tape recording and stereo playback, died Sunday, October 27 of emphysema at an assisted living center in Aventura, Florida, near Miami. He was 77.
Trained as a multi-instrumental musician, Dowd was drawn to physics and engineering at an early age. He worked on the particle accelerator at Columbia University after graduating from Stuyvesant High School at the age of 16. Two years later, during World War II, he…
Back in June of 1992, Lewis Lipnick auditioned one of the era's benchmark products, the Cello Palette Preamplifier. LL comments, "The Palette Preamplifier gives the listener a glimpse of what performers experience every day on stage: total immersion in the music."
Back in May 2000, Brian Damkroger assembled the Bright Star Audio Rack of Gibraltar 2 equipment rack and put his components on its shelves. As BD notes, "Bright Star Audio's Rack of Gibraltar equipment racks are exceptional cases whose forms truly do follow their functions."
Next, we have John Marks reviewing the recently…
As first reported April 8 in EETimes, Sony has made known its plans for the first generation of Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD) players, to be released in Japan this May. For the last several months, Sony has been suggesting that the SACD format would be going head to head with the competing DVD-Audio format, despite overtures from the DVD-Audio Working Group to join in a single all-encompassing specification.
But at the last Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, several companies hinted at players that would play all formats. Prototypes shown by Yamaha and Denon led some to…
"How much power do you really need? How much power can you actually use? What's necessary, and what's icing on the cake? And does anyone really need 1000Wpc?" Jonathan Scull takes the Boulder 2050 monoblock amplifier into the listening chamber to confront these and other pressing audio dilemmas.
Next, Paul Bolin listens to the Acoustic Zen interconnects, AC, and speaker cables remarking, "If the devil is in the details, then Beelzebub has taken up residence in the collections of cables we use to connect our components."
Robert Deutsch fires up the Balanced Audio Technology VK-5…
One of the most fascinating aspects of the digital age is that clever students—or sometimes, clever dropouts—can undo the work of teams of PhD engineers.
Among the latest thorns in the side of the music industry are homegrown twists on Apple Computer's iTunes program that let users copy songs or song lists from each others' computers, as well as stream entire music libraries throughout local area networks, such as in college dormitories. So-called companion programs, such as "MyTunes" and "GetTunes," circumvent anti-copying code in iTunes software so that users can share music with each…
It's no secret that Dolby Laboratories doesn't aim its audio compression technologies at the high-end consumer audio market. After all, Dolby excels at finding ways to get maximum performance out of limited-bandwidth environments such as the audio cassette, or the space alloted for 5.1-channel soundtracks on DVDs.
At the recent Audio for DVD Seminar held at company headquarters in San Francisco, the folks from Dolby often referred to audiophiles as "them"---as in "us and them." Nonetheless, Dolby seems sympathic to the concerns of tweaks troubled by any compression schemes being used to…
Among the terrible news coming out of the Gulf states these past few days, we heard the sad news that Gary Warzin, one of the co-founders, with Tony Gregory, of high-end distribution company Audiophile Systems, had died on Saturday August 27 at just 56. Audiophile Systems had grown to prominence in the 1970s and '80s marketing Linn components in the US, and after Linn had set up their own distribution, had worked hard to establish the Arcam and dCS brands in the US. We reproduce below the email we received from Audiophile Systems, telling us of the news, but I'd like to offer my own memory of…
Once again, audiophiles can help themselves and others at the same time by participating in The Cable Company's seventh annual "Summer Against Hunger" campaign. The Cable Company, and several suppliers (listed below) have set up a program by which up to 10% of the Cable Company's August sales are donated to CARE and the International Rescue Committee, with contributions to be used to assist the worldwide disaster relief efforts of those humanitarian organizations.
The Cable Company is donating 5% of its total sales and participating manufacturers are matching this with their own 5%…