Long-time industry watchers will remember Glazier and Herron as significant contributors to…
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Carson City, NV loudspeaker company Wisdom Audio has been aggressively reorganizing itself lately. The first part of the program was re-uniting founder Tom Bohlender with erstwhile partner David Graebner to refine and perfect the magnetic planar speaker technology used by Wisdom's hybrid planar/dynamic loudspeakers. Then, in October 2006, the company appointed industry veteran Mark Glazier president. On February 8, Glazier announced that Jon Herron would join the company as vice president of sales.
It's funny how things sometimes have to hit you in the head before you actually notice them. When Jon Iverson and I were cruising CES 2007 in January, we were stopped in our tracks by Sooloos's media server technology. Sooloos got the whole no-compromise audiophile approach, but what really knocked us out was how thoroughly it utilized the metadata from AMG (All Media Guide): Feed the the Sooloos server a disc and it would access AMG's database and collect artist name, album title, track names, cover art, genre, mood, side-man information, and even "associated concepts."
When Rob Darling…
The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, which last June became one of the first orchestras in the US to launch its own e-label, has now become the first orchestra to offer download-only binaural recordings. The binaural process, whose benefits are most apparent to those who listen through headphones, is based on the concept that the best way to reproduce the concert experience is to make sure that the recorded sounds that go into the listener's ears are as close as possible to what would be heard during an actual concert.
The MSO's binaural venture is the brainchild of Robert Levine, cochair of…
John Atkinson forwarded a message to me on February 26 from reader Peter Clissold: "The Miller and Kreisel website is indicating that operations there are closed."
Sure enough, when I went there, the page had little more than the following message: "As of Thursday, Feb 22, the M&K Factory is closed. For more information regarding Ken Kreisel's recent decision to close the M&K Chatsworth factory after 34 years, please email Ken Kreisel directly."
Having spent some extremely pleasant hours interviewing Kreisel in 1997, I emailed him, asking what was going on.
In…
Audiophiles of a certain age may very well have first tasted high-end sound by way of Linn's 1972 Sondek LP12 turntable and/or Naim's 1982 Nait integrated amplifier. There aren't many audio manufacturers that have managed to keep components in production for 25 years (35 for the Linn), but the two venerable British designs have been continuously upgraded over their lives, keeping them competitive.
Linn's approach to the LP12 has been to offer component upgrades to the original design. Over the years, the company has offered new motors, bearings, suspensions, power supplies—just about…
Oooohh! Aaaahh! Coochy-coo! are not the usual spontaneous reactions from hard-boiled audio journalists to the unveiling of a hi-fi component. Nor is the Silverstone Circuit, the self-proclaimed Home of British Motor Racing, the usual venue for such a launch. But the news that UK audio manufacturer Meridian and Ferrari were cuddling up together on a joint project was enough to drag yours truly halfway across the country to deep Northamptonshire on a miserably wet February morning.
The Meridian F80—an ultrastylish, one-box audio system—is a complete departure for Meridian. But when…
Marquis Classics, a Toronto-based CD label specializing in classical, jazz, world, and crossover recordings, recently issued its second batch of "Orion Master Recordings." Drawn from the large classical catalog of the defunct Orion LP label, the CDs include prized rare recordings by Robert Silverman, Steven Staryk, Joel Krosnick, Leonid Kogan, and other fine artists.
Orion was the brainchild of Giveon Cornfield, who in the early 1960s started the Baroque Record Company of Canada. Baroque recorded a host of young Canadian artists who had not previously made recordings, including Silverman…
(This article has been edited to reflect factual changes and comments from our learned colleague, Dr. Kalman Rubinson, Associate Professor at NYU's Department of Physiology and Neuroscience, who is careful to point out that he is commenting, not on the research, which he has not read, but only Heimburg's and Jackson's criticisms of current understanding and terminology—areas with which he has more than a passing acquaintance.)
In a statement that turns conventional knowledge on its ear, Thomas Heimburg and Andrew Jackson of Copenhagen University have declared that nerves do not relay…
Wireworld: Wireworld has "completely redesigned" its Series 52 (pronounced "five squared") audio cables. Chief engineer David Salz says they deliver the "highest fidelity the company has ever offered."
"Our approach has always been to design cables that sound as close to a direct connection as possible in double-blind listening tests" Salz says. "This means that in practice good cable design is all about minimizing the non-linear effects that degrade the audio signal. The theoretical ideal for this is to have a pair of conductors arranged in thin-walled concentric tubes to maintain…
On March 2, the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) published a "Determination of Rates and Terms," which announced an artist and recording company royalty fee structure for Internet radio based upon a "per song" structure. As it so happens, that was the model proposed by SoundExchange, a digital fee collection agency founded by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
According to Radio and Internet Newsletter (RAIN), the CRB has determined that the fees, which will be effective retroactively to the beginning of 2006, will be ramped up each year through 2010, with a cost of 0.08…