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In his primer this week on compression, Wes Phillips mentions the now-ubiquitous use of "louderization" in CD production, which fills in the musical valleys and flattens the expressionistic hills to make a recording sound uniformly loud. Stereophile editor John Atkinson has long railed against this practice, so when Bob Reina asked John to record his new jazz quartet, Attention Screen, John felt that this would be the opportunity to put his money where his mouth was. He would record the band, which mixes electric instruments—guitar and bass guitar—with acoustic—piano and drums—as though it…
Tweeter Home Entertainment Group, Inc filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on June 11. The move was not entirely unexpected, since the company had indicated in May that it might be forced to file if it could not access additional funding.
A disappointing Q4 2006 performance, exacerbated by flat-screen price wars during the Christmas season (a period when Tweeter's share price dropped 32%), damaged the company, which had begun reorganizing the previous year. In March the company announced 650 layoffs (starting with 70 executive positions) and closed 49 stores—stores that were…
On June 15, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), US Chamber of Commerce, and the Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy (CACP) announced an ambitious agenda to convince Congress and the White House to "transform the enforcement of U.S. intellectual property rights laws."
"Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned," NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton said. "Add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft to fraud, to burglary, bank robbing, all of it costs the…
The 10th annual The Home Entertainment Show (T.H.E. Show), which will run January 7–10, 2008, concurrent with the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), has expanded its exhibit space to include both the completely renovated Alexis Park Resort Hotel and its neighbor, the St. Tropez Hotel. By using both venues, T.H.E. Show, in effect, throws down the gauntlet to CES, which last year abandoned its traditional high-end audio home at the Alexis Park and moved High-Performance Audio to the Venetian Hotel.
"We're building something special here," Richard Beers, president of T.H.E. Show, told…
When Fred Kaplan made his Stereophile debut with his review of the Rogue Audio Atlas power amplifier last March, our scheme was also to publish his writings on the music that fuels his soul, jazz. Starting this past weekend, you can find Fred's thoughts on recordings, concerts, musicians, and the music at http://blog.stereophile.com/fredkaplan.
A near neighbor of mine in Brooklyn, Fred's pedigree as a writer on audio is wide and deep: He was an audio reviewer and jazz critic for The Abso!ute Sound from 1984 to 2006, with something in every issue except for the three years (1992–95) when…
According to market research company NPD Group, in the first quarter of 2007, Apple's iTunes Store has overtaken Amazon.com and Target to become the US's third largest music retailer with 9.8% of all music sales. Apple counts 12 track sales as equivalent to one CD sale, meaning that the company is responsible for nearly 21 million of the quarter's 212 million CD sales.
Wal-Mart, with 15.8% market share, and Best Buy, with 13.8%, were the largest and second-largest music retailers this quarter. What's fascinating about these results is that none of these outlets represents what would have…
We received a e-mail recently from long-time reader Sharon Churchill, which linked to an article in the New Scientist Invention blog concerning a recent Sony patent application for a system that will automatically recalibrate its response to put the sweet spot where the listener is, wherever that might be.
"Pretty cool stuff," but, as Churchill pointed out, there was no mention of it on Stereophile's website, which made the news seem a trifle untrustworthy. Have no fear, we're on the job.
The patent specifies that the "multichannel stereophony sound system" has a "relative…
Now that more and more music lovers are turning to the Internet to purchase CDs, DVDs, and downloadable files#151;see WP's story on iTunes this week—Naxos isn't taking any chances. The world's largest classical music label, whose US branch, Naxos of America, also claims to be the #1 independent distributor of classical music in the US, has recently set up multiple websites to lure music lovers into the fold.
In the cyberland of the red, white, and blue, Naxos of America has established its own online boutique, NaxosDirect. There, consumers can purchase all of the label's US-distributed…
On Thursday, June 28, the US Supreme Court voted 5-4 that manufacturers could impose minimum prices if "they promote competition." The case—Leegin v. PSKS—involved Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc., a California-based manufacturer of women's fashion accessories, which argued that it had the right to set minimum consumer prices on its products to maintain price consistency among the niche retailers it sold to. Those stores, Leegin argued, emphasized customer service, which allowed them to compete with discount retailers that are selling more widely distributed, inexpensive products.
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Some days the music business reminds us of that old Tom Lehrer quote: "Political satire became obsolete the day they awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger." It also seems that you can't out-stupid the record industry.
Consider the case of Prince and The Mail on Sunday: On June 28, TMOS announced that it would offer Prince's 10-track Planet Earth CD (due to be released in the UK on July 24) as a free "covermount" on an "imminent" edition. In addition, Prince announced plans to give the CDs to everyone who bought tickets for his 21-night stand in London.
The Mail on…