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Vinyl Daze

This last week has generated more mainstream coverage of the vinyl world than we've seen in, say, the last 20 years.

What caught people's attention was an essay by Wired's Elliot Van Buskirk, "Vinyl May Be Final Nail in CD's Coffin", which stated that pressing plants, distributors, and marketing mavens are all touting booming business in LPs—RTI's Don MacInnes said RTI's business was up 25% over 2006.

Van Buskirk cited a trend among consumers to use MP3s for portability and LPs for sound. He also pointed out that, although CD theoretically has wider dynamic range (he said it, I…

Zucker Says the Darnedest Things

When we last heard from NBC Universal's CEO Jeff Zucker, he'd refused to renew the network's yearly contract with Apple's iTunes Store, leading Apple to immediately pull NBC shows from the store rather than have them yanked midseason. In addition, Apple managed to control the story so that NBC came off looking clueless and greedy. You'd think Zucker would have learned to keep his mouth shut from that media drubbing.

You'd be wrong.

On October 29, Variety quoted from a Zucker/Ken Auletta interview at a Syracuse University benefit. Zucker claimed NBC U wanted to "explore" a new…

Olive and MusicGiants Team Up

Olive Media Products, manufacturers of audiophile-quality Olive music servers, has partnered with MusicGiants, the leading site for CD-quality music downloads. Olive's well-received Opus line of digital players now allows users to download, store, manage, and play large collections of CD-quality music directly from MusicGiants without needing to buy or rip CDs, select track by track, or use a computer. (You can find John Atkinson's positive review of the Olive Symphony here.)

MusicGiants' pre-selected, "ready to enjoy" music libraries, accessible at www.olive.us/p_bin/?cid=…

Tributaries Offers Flagship Cables

John Atkinson and I recently spent a few hours talking to cable manufacturer Tributaries' president and founder, Joe Perfito. Perfito had come to NYC to meet the press and introduce his company's newest cable families, the high-end Series 7 and the higher-end Series 9. "The Series 9 cables are the best cables we know how to make," Perfito told us. "The interconnects are hand-made of 20AWF solid OFHC signal conductor and a 1.25% silver-plated 46-strand 20AWG OFHC return conductor. We use an LDPE dielectric and an OFHC copper-braided shield and a double-sided copper foil secondary shield for…

iTrax High-Def Downloads Now Available

Mark Waldrep, the man behind the "only all-HD digital label," Aix Records, has now established an all-HD download site, www.itrax.com. While Music Giants and Linn offer HD downloads, iTrax calls itself "the only website to offer real HD in multiple mixing perspectives," since it offers consumers two-channel stereo, 5.1-channel "audience," and 5.1-channel "stage" perspectives in MP3, Dolby Digital, DTS, WMA pro, WMA Lossless, and PCM 96kHz/24-bit resolutions.

MusicGiants also offers "high-rez" downloads, meaning DRM-free WMA Lossless files, which is certainly high-rez compared to any lossy…

The Tape Project Ships First Title

As we reported last January, The Tape Project, a collaboration among mastering engineers Paul Stubblebine and Michael Romanowski, both of Paul Stubblebine Mastering, and Dan Schmalle of Bottlehead, plans to release 10 master-quality tapes per year. The Tape Project's inaugural outing, available now, is The Number White by jazz vocalist Jaqui Naylor.

The ¼" half-track open-reel tapes are recorded at 15ips, equalized to the IEC curve (previously known as CCIR). "There are many machines that meet these specs," said Schmalle, "but many don't—so the Tape Project's website has a database of…

Warner CEO: "We Were Wrong."

Speaking at the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress in Macau on November 13, Warner Music Group (WMG) chairman and CEO Edgar Bronfman, Jr. warned mobile phone executives to heed the mistakes of the record industry as it moved forward.

"Music is crucial to the future of the mobile industry," Bronfman said. "Consumers remind us of this every day."

"Our two industries have some critical choices to make and not a lot of time to make them. Take it from us music industry folks. We used to fool ourselves. We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business…

ATI Buys Theta Digital

Theta Digital, the "Digital Done Right" pioneer of separate DACs and transports, has been sold to Amplifier Technologies, Inc. ATI has pledged to immediately begin work on selected Theta audiophile and home-theater products.

"We have long admired Theta for its stature in the industry and we look forward to providing Theta with ATI's extensive resources," stated ATI president Morris Kessler in an announcement released November 15. "Our goal is to strengthen Theta's continuing commitment to providing state-of-the-art products."

Kessler, who owned the fabled SAE company in the 1960s…

CEA Cracks Down on "Journalists"

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has always been aimed at the electronics industry and the reporters who cover it. Other than a brief experiment with "open" days toward the end of the summer CES held in Chicago in the mid-1990s, the exhibition has never been open to the public.

Adventurous and persistent audiophiles have almost always found ways to attend, however. Either they finesse dealer credentials from their local retailer, or, as was the case with more than a few of our more obsessive acquaintances, they claim to represent fictional periodicals (or, more recently, websites). For…

ERA to Music Industry: DRM Must Die

According to an article posted by The Financial Times November 20, Kim Bailey, the director general of the UK trade group Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) is urging the music industry to drop digital rights management (DRM), saying that incompatible proprietary technologies, rather than preventing unlicensed copying, discourage sales of electronic files, "stifling growth and working against the consumer interest."

Ms. Bailey noted that recording labels have been "quick to complain" that declining CD sales have not been balanced by a commensurate growth in sales of digital files,…