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…
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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").
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…
Okay, now things are getting confusing. Hot on the heels of his announcement that he had hacked HD DVD's Advanced Access Content System (AACS) digital rights management (DRM), muslix64 claimed to have done the same to Blu-Ray's implementation, with the help of anti-DRM crusader Janvitos. You can read the whole saga at the Doom9 forum but we'll just give you the juicy bits: "In less than 24 hours, without any Blu-ray equipment, but with the help of Janvitos, I managed to decrypt and play a Blu-ray media file using my known-plaintext attack."
For those of us not fluent in heavy code-speak,…
PS Audio's Paul McGowan is a man with a mission: He wants to teach audiophiles about AC power, from the creation of the universe to its final destination in our contemporary electronics components. Toward that end, McGowan wrote, produced, and narrated a one-hour documentary DVD called From Coal to Coltrane, which provides a lively look at a subject many of us take for granted.
He covers the Edison/Tesla current war, takes viewers into the bowels of Hoover Dam, and visits the world's first AC generating plant in Telluride, CO. Along the way, he drops in on recording engineers, musicians,…
Out of all the audiophile phrases, none stirs the hearts of music lovers like "true to the master tape"—not even "the absolute sound" of the original instruments, which even audio idealists realize is simply too much to demand. But true to the sound of the recorded master tape, now surely that's a goal within reach.
Lord knows people have been promising that for years, from direct-to-disc recording to half-speed mastering to redithered CDs, yet the goal has remained tantalizingly out of reach—until now, perhaps. Linn Records and The Tape Project have recently proposed different ideas for…