Lyngdorf is well known to audiophiles, of course, for his work at NAD, Tact, and Millenium—he is obviously a man to be reckoned with. And Steinway must be fully committed to a system to name it after its D-model concert grands, considered by…
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It's not that we're jaded, but most mornings as we open the day's press releases, we manage to curb our enthusiasm as we read of the breakthroughs du jour. Yet, when we read that Steinway & Sons and Peter Lyngdorf had collaborated (as Steinway Lyngdorf) on a $150,000 "Steinway & Sons Model-D Music System," we knew we had to hear it.
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has taken its first giant steps into the digital domain. Hard on the heels of launching the orchestra's new in-house CD label, CSO Resound, it has announced a partnership with digital distributor IODA that will make CSO Resound recordings available for download via iTunes, Yahoo! Music, Rhapsody, Napster, Verizon, Sprint, and other online retailers.
The CSO's outreach initiative follows similar initiatives from the San Francisco Symphony and other US orchestras but extends even further. Following a six-year hiatus, the orchestra has resumed its radio…
When we last heard from Linn, The Scotsman reported layoffs, restructuring, and a hoped-for resurgence. On May 25, we received a note from Ivor S. Tiefenbrun, Linn's founder, that he had returned to the positions of chairman and managing director, after an absence of four or five years due to serious health problems, thanks to new medications that have "returned [him] to fitness and restored energy levels."
Further, Mr. Tiefenbrun reported, he has appointed Steve Croft, formerly Linn's UK sales manager, to the position of director of sales. Thomas Saheicha, previous director of sales,…
On May 23, Sonos announced the release of Sonos Software v 2.2, which adds Pandora's personalized Internet radio service to Sonos' wireless multi-room music systems.
Pandora, which bills itself as "radio from the Music Genome Project," analyzes songs based on 400 musical attributes (such as melody, harmony, rhythm, form, composition, and lyrics—but not genre) and then creates a "radio station" consisting of other songs that the MGP suggests share attributes. Pandora is a fee-based Internet service, so Sonos' new linking capability includes a 30-day trial membership to introduce Sonos…
The Home Entertainment Show 2007 held May 11—13, 2007, at the Grand Hyatt New York Hotel in New York City, will be remembered by exhibitors, consumers, and visiting media as a well-attended showcase of some of the finest home-entertainment products available.
Over 10,000 audio and video enthusiasts and more than 450 members of the press from all over the globe attended the Show and had a chance to see, hear and try out more than 250 brands in over 100 demo rooms. In addition, showgoers were delighted by a variety of free musical performances from jazz and classical musicians, while…
McIntosh Laboratory announced its $6000 MS750 music server on May 30. The second music server in McIntosh's line, the MS750 incorporates a 750GB hard drive and integrated Web interface capabilities. McIntosh estimates that the MS750 is capable of storing 2700 CDs at full resolution, or about 12,000 songs.
The MS750 also incorporates a CD transport to facilitate ripping CDs onto hard drive (not to mention burning playlists onto CD-R). The transport plays CDs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, MP3, WMA, and AAC formats. Free Lossless Audio Compression (FLAC) encoding and decoding eliminate the need for lossy…
On May 30, Apple officially launched iTunes Plus, billed as "DRM-free music tracks featuring high-quality 256kbps AAC encoding for audio quality virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings." The initial material available from the iTunes Plus section of the iTunes Media Store is, for the moment, limited to EMI artists, although other labels have announced pending deals with Apple. The "improved" songs sell for $1.29 rather than the standard 99¢.
Early on quite a few glitches seemed to mark many consumers' experience with iTunes Plus files. In order to access the iTunes Plus…
ArkivMusic, one of the Web's leading sources for classical music recordings, has struck a deal that enables them to release on their own reissue label, ArkivCD, out-of-print titles from the extensive catalogues of EMI Classics, Virgin Classics, and Angel Records. The reissues are available "on demand," copied from actual out-of-print CD releases (not master tapes) without compression or enhancement, and are often accompanied by copies of the original liner notes.
Thomas Evered, General Manager and Senior Vice President of EMI Classics/Angel Records, heads the conglomerate's classical…
We were taking our morning constitutional around the Interwebs one day last week when we happened upon an article on Timesonline titled "Why Music Really Is Getting Louder". Oh boy, we thought, a mainstream outlet is catching on to the whole issue of dynamic compression—a subject we have inveighed against repeatedly over the years. (JA first preached that particular sermon back in 1999.)
But when we actually read the article by Adam Sherwin, "media consultant," we happened upon a sentence so ill-informed that our eyebrows nearly zoomed through our hairline (well, if we had a hairline,…
Scott Bahneman, CEO of MusicGiants, called earlier this week to announce what he called big news. "Actually," Bahneman said, "we're not going to issue an official press release—yet—but MusicGiants is going to offer Windows Media Audio (WMA) lossless music downloads without DRM.
"We'll do a press release when the parties we're working with are ready to make announcements, but our first DRM-free title will be Paul McCartney's Memory Almost Full. Our HD releases aren't 256kbps files, they truly are 'true CD quality' at almost four times that bandwidth—up to 1100kbps."
You've always…