So when webmaster Jon Iverson asked me if I wanted to see the 10 most-read URLs on our website, I responded with alacrity. Of course I did. Here's the…
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Here at Stereophile we like to measure things. Part of that is because we can, of course—and that's another reason why we love the Internet. We have no way of knowing how many times our readers re-read certain articles, nor do we know how many different readers look at any given issue, but on the web, we can at least count the page views. Yes, we know that there are some uncertainties about that metric, too, but we can count it, so we do.
HD DVDs and Blu-Ray discs came to market with a digital rights management (DRM) content encryption system called Advanced Access Content System (AACS). Supposedly, AACS was intended to permit greater flexibility than conventional DVD's Content Scrambling System (CSS) DRM, since it was touted as allowing purchasers, say, to load DVDs onto their media servers or burn downloaded HD purchases to disc.
In reality, however, some consumers found that their expensive HD monitors wouldn't sync to the players because AACS didn't recognize them as legitimate. Needless to say, this did not endear…
We've written frequently about the lawsuits brought by the recording industry against alleged downloaders, but here's an interesting fact: None of the cases has actually gone to trial yet. Many have been dropped by the labels when it appeared they had targeted the wrong defendants; even more have been settled by defendants intimidated by the $750-per-song damages claimed by the labels. Now an attorney is vigorously seeking a trial—and one of his big arguments is that the labels' math doesn't add up.
Ray Beckerman, the attorney who represents Marie Lindor in UMG v Lindor, alleges that the…
On December 13, 2006, the US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the August 8, 2005 grant of summary judgment in favor of AudioQuest, finding that the district court had correctly terminated Monster Cable's January 5, 2004 assertion that AudioQuest's Dielectric-Bias System (DBS) willfully infringed upon Monster's Bias Circuit System (BCS) patent (US Patent No.5,307,416 for Audio Interconnect & Speaker Cable, "Bias Circuit System").
Monster's suit alleged that AudioQuest's Earth Feature and Circular Array cables infringed upon its mid-1990s cable-biasing system, in which a coaxial…
The 2007 Consumer Electronics Show may be officially over, but you can still read our on-going coverage at our show blog.
For far longer than I've been attending the January Consumer Electronics Show (CES), it has overlapped with the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo. Indeed, in the old days when the high-end portion of CES was housed in the Sahara hotel and casino, the two shows shared the same venue, leading to one of the more bizarre culture collisions known to modern man (one was certainly never in doubt as to who was there for which show).
This year, with the high-end's relocation to the Venetian Hotel/Sands Expo and Convention Center, the two shows once again were rubbing elbows. The proximity doesn't…
On our last News Desk post of 2006, we reported that an anonymous hacker called Muslix64 had announced that he had cracked the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) digital rights management (DRM) scheme. Muslix64 said he'd release more details (and decryption software) on January 2. That software, called BackupHDDVD, is now available online and the Internets have been all atwitter about it, with charges ranging from "bogus!" to "hallelujah!"
Integral to this discussion is that Muslix64 was prompted to crack AACS not out of a desire to pirate HD DVD content, but out of frustration that he…
Deutsche Grammophon and Decca/London have announced a first in the history of opera on DVD: the simultaneous release of Mozart's entire oeuvre of operas and operatic fragments. Captured live at the 2006 Salzburg Festival as part of the 250th-anniversary celebration of Mozart's birth, the 19 DVDs feature striking productions of all 22 operas, plus a wealth of bonus interviews with conductors, singers, and other members of the artistic team.
All 51 hours of music and drama—perhaps the most extensive audio-video project of all time—is processed in what series producer Roland Ott terms "state…
While both XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio have been growing their subscriber bases (almost 8 million for each), Wall Street has remained unimpressed. Both firms ended 2006 with stock prices that were approximately half their 2006 levels (Sirius at $3.54 and XM at $14.45).
Toward the end of 2006, rumors were rife about the two companies merging. Interestingly, these seemed to stem primarily from Sirius, with CEO Mel Karmazin lauding the potential benefits of a merger. David Frear, Sirius' chief financial officer, also thought it was a logical solution, telling the New York…
Gracenote's CMI: Many audiophiles are joyously embracing high-end music servers in their systems, but one vexing little problem has remained for serious music listeners: The metadata tags that work so well for popular music are completely inadequate for identifying classical works.
In most cases popular music can adequately be categorized with three pieces of information: album title, track title, and artist. This breaks down with multi-movement classical works, multi-artist ensembles, and compositions that are distinguished by category (symphony, quartet, concerto, etc), movement, and…