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…
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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).
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…
Harmonia Mundi, one of the world's leading independent classical music labels, has finally taken the downloading plunge. In an agreement with the Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA), the world's largest distributor of digital music content, announced on January 24 at the annual music conference of the Marche International De l'Edition Musicale (MIDEM) in Cannes, Harmonia Mundi will make available its entire catalogue of early music and contemporary recordings to hundreds of digital music outlets around the world. IODA will also handle digital distribution of HM's catalogue within…
Back in 1992, Stereophile got into the business of concert promotion when it booked Canadian pianist Robert Silverman for two evenings of recitals in order to record his performances for a live double CD, Concert (STPH005-2). We don't believe in rushing to repeat a success, so 15 years later, on February 10, we're promoting another concert, this time featuring Attention Screen, the quartet led by Stereophile reviewer and jazz pianist Bob Reina.
Attention Screen also features Don Fiorino on guitar, lap steel, lotar (a four-string Moroccan lute), and extreme ukulele; Chris Jones on fretless…
The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) has issued a position paper on consumer recording rights, which it expects to be a "key issue in 2007." The CEA's position, in brief: "We urge Congress to refrain from limiting fair use and encourage market-based solutions to home recording and digital rights management issues."
The one-page paper is admirably succinct and free of cant. The CEA cautions that "home recording and piracy should not be confused," since home recording is not the same as re-broadcast or mass commercial distribution. The CEA also calls for warning labels on "copy-…
We reported in 2005 on the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) lawsuit against Patricia Santangelo and her suit in response to the trade group's allegations that she had participated in peer-to-peer file sharing. The record companies dropped their legal actions against Ms. Santangelo in December 2006, instead deciding to charge two of her children, Robert (16) and Michelle (20), with downloading songs from Kazaa.
On January 30, Robert Santangelo and attorney Jordan Glass filed 32 defenses against five labels, counter-claiming that the suits damaged Santangelo's reputation,…
An essay with the unassuming title of "Thoughts on Music" has certainly caused a furor over the last week. Of course, it didn't hurt that it was written by Apple's Steve Jobs or that he stated absolutely that digital rights management copy restriction systems "haven't worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy."
No he didn't! we hear you saying. Oh, but he did, he did. Why would Jobs, who runs the largest DRM-encumbered download website of them all, say such a thing? There's no shortage of speculation on that point.
For one thing, the Norwegian Consumer Council had just…