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Dealer Profile—Ultimate Audio Video

What is the best environment in which to demonstrate and enjoy high-quality audio gear? According to Richard Rives Bird, founder and president of Rives Audio, the answer is simple: an acoustically engineered room.

Stereophile recently sent me to the Chicago 'burbs to check out the two no-holds-barred, acoustically engineered listening rooms of Ultimate Audio Video. Both rooms have been designed to Rives Audio's highest standard, which Bird calls Level 3. Located in the basements of private homes in Deerfield and nearby Northbrook, the rooms represent the realization of dreams…

<I>There Lies the Home</I>, a new Cantus CD, released

There Lies the Home, the sixth CD of Minnesotan male-voice choir Cantus recorded by Stereophile editor John Atkinson, is released this week.

Recorded straight to hard disk at 88.2kHz with 24-bit resolution, There Lies the Home features a set of works about the sea, including Peter (P.D.Q. Bach) Schickele's whimsical "Jonah's Song," with its piratical rolled rrrrs, an arrangement for unaccompanied voices of Sting's "Valparaiso," from his 1996 Mercury Falling CD, and an arrangement for solo baritone, cello, and guitar of Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."

The…

Terry Cain Needs Audiophile Aid

Dedicated audiophile and all-around nice chap Bill Leebens sent along an email a few days ago, noting:
"Stereophile friends:

"I appreciated the support you all gave the Audio Asylum/Audiogon Tsunami auction. I'd like to bring another worthwhile cause to your attention.

"Terry Cain, of Cain & Cain loudspeakers and all-around good guy, is seriously ill with ALS—Lou Gehrig's disease.

"Terry's cousin Kathy Gee has set up a special account for Terry's continuing medical care, and Srajan Ebaen of 6Moons.com has been kind enough to put up a page where individuals,…

Tweeter Teams with Sonos to Woo Music Lovers

Tweeter Home Entertainment Group, Inc., the national electronics retail chain, has teamed with Sonos, Inc., developer of wireless multiroom music systems for the digital home, to bring "the digital home experience directly to the retail floor." The retailer will run broadband Internet connections to Sonos Digital Music System point-of-sale displays at over 150 Tweeter locations, to give music lovers live demonstrations of music server systems.

Sonos' Thomas Meyer was enthusiastic about getting the Sonos system into customers' hands. "Our product is easy to use, so why not meet people…

CES Attendees Cautiously Optimistic About the Venetian

Despite griping and grumbling about the change, many makers of high-performance audio gear appear to have settled on their new official venue at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas: the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino. Two months before the start of the 2007 CES (to be held January 8–11), all but 12 of the Venetian's 198 exhibit rooms and suites had already been sold.

But precious few CDs, LPs, or DVDs will be available for purchase at the Venetian—virtually all vendors of audiophile recordings are either boycotting the hotel entirely, or have committed to display…

Copyright Office Lists New Exceptions to the DMCA

On November 22, the Librarian of Congress issued a—take a deep breath— declaration of exemption from the prohibition against circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. In other words, the LOC decreed that six classes of "non-infringing rights" were exempt from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which criminalized "production and dissemination of technology whose primary purpose is to circumvent measures taken to protect copyright."

The exemptions are:
1) Educational libraries can make copies of audiovisual works "when circumvention is…

Burwen Bobcat Now Available as Download

We received an interesting email from engineer Richard Burwen just before the Thanksgiving business break:

"Download the new Burwen Bobcat RE (recording version) at the new Burwen Bobcat website and store for $199.95 at www.burwenbobcat.com.

"Burwen Bobcat RE plugs into the Windows Media Player, taking advantage of its music and video library. It enhances sound when listening, ripping or burning CDs; and at high speed, it converts files to MP3s that give your iPod or musical cell phone sound comparable with a $100,000 hi-fi system. This new version works with your computer sound…

Classical Heaven?

One of the great tragedies of Tower Records' lingering demise was that classical music lovers lost perhaps their most reliable source of recordings. Say what you will about brick-and-mortar record stores, there was something wonderful about finding what you wanted where it was supposed to be. Just try looking up, say, Bruckner's Fourth Symphony on Amazon and see what you get. (Amazon's AI, as good as it is, is a classical music idiot.)

I was musing about this, as well as other matters, a few weeks ago at a get-together of former Tower classical employees we'd informally dubbed the "Tower…

The Same Language

I'm currently attending GuangZhou Hi-Fi 2006 in GuangZhou, China (you can read my China Hi-Fi Tour 2006 blog). The show is a fantastic audio event and everywhere I look, I see products I want—some very similar to mainstream US brands and some exceedingly strange and different. But the audiophiles are familiar: Show me a guy who lights up in the glow of a 300B and I'll show you one of my chosen people.

On the first day of the show, I participated in a working lunch and free-wheeling Q&A with show founder Matthew Zhou, several high-end mainland manufacturers, and members of the Chinese…

Bold New Move?

Record industry policy, when it comes to digital downloads, has always been to give the consumers what it wants them to have: files that may, but probably won't, work in all of their purchasers' devices.

What we're talking about is DRM (digital rights management), a set of restrictions that keep, say, files being sold on Apple's iTunes Music Store from being played on the personal digital devices manufactured by other companies—and prevent iPods from playing music downloaded from most non-Apple websites.

EMI Music is releasing individual tracks from new recordings by Norah Jones…