Bouchard has been involved in the high-end audio business since 1972, having worked with Ohm Acoustics, Dahlquist, Acoustic Research, Red Rose Music, Denon, and Cello with Mark Levinson. However, his passions weren't focused solely on hi-fi—he's a professional…
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We received word December 21 that Ultralink/XLO Products executive vice-president Don Bouchard was injured in a "serious motorcycle accident in Texas." Bouchard is currently recovering in a Houston hospital, surrounded by his family, close friends, and business associates. Knowing Don, we're sure that's a packed hospital room.
MTV published an end of the year review of the music business on December 17, "Madonna Ditches Label, Radiohead Go Renegade: The Year The Music Industry Broke." Month by month, it's a litany of bad tidings for the biz, from January 14, 2007, the day the Dreamgirls soundtrack hit number 1 on Billboard's pop charts with a scant 60,000 copies sold (lowest #1 ever) through December 3, 2007's announcements that Def Jam and EMI were laying off employees and Warner Music Group would cut executive bonuses (awww).
Reading the list at a sitting makes 2007 looks even more like a clusterfark than it…
Starbucks, look out! ArkivMusic is on your tail. Just in time for the holidays, the Internet's major classical-music site has teamed up with the Canadian Brass to create ArkivMusic's first new recording, Christmas Tradition: Music for Brass and Organ. The CD, recorded for the Canadian Brass's own label, Opening Day (ODR 7345), includes music by composers who, over the years, have written some of the ensemble's favorite music and arrangements.
The CD is a pet project of ArkivMusic's founder and president, Eric Feidner, and his twin brother, general manager Jon Feidner, both of whom are…
On December 27, Amazon.com and Warner Music Group announced that WMG's entire 2.9 million-song catalog would be available on Amazon's DRM-free, à la carte MP3 store—the first time the entire Warner catalog has been available online and the first time it has been offered sans DRM.
In a famous reply to Steve Jobs' "Thoughts On Music", WMG CEO Edgar Bronfman said last February, "We will not abandon DRM nor services that are successfully implementing DRM for both content and consumers." The problem with that stance was that there was only one company that was successful with DRM-protected…
When we awoke on December 30, we found our in-boxes full of emails linking to The Washington Post's "Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use", which reported that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) were charging that Jeffrey and Pamela Howell's transfer of 2000 legally purchased recordings to his computer as MP3 files represented "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.
The Post story left out that the Howells supposedly belonged to KaZaa and were turned in when a computer technician detected KaZaa software on their machine. Therefore, the suit…
The world of loudspeaker aficionados has at one end most of us, who use multi-way box speakers of one kind of another; in the center are the lovers of panels, electrostatic, planar magnetics—it doesn't matter as much as the fact there is no box—and at the extreme other end are the lovers of high-sensitivity designs, where massive amounts of art, artifice, and loving care are applied to wrest full-range sound from a single drive-unit. Overcoming the daunting problems of getting a single drive-unit to work from 20Hz to 20kHz is, by those, felt to be outweighed by the benefits of not having a…
Wadia Digital, Inc. announced that it will debut the $349 iTransport iPod dock in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) January 7, 2008. Certified by Apple as "Made for iPod®," the iTransport bypasses the iPod's internal D/A conversion to output an S/PDIF signal, "providing CD-quality resolution from full-resolution from file formats such as .WAV and [Apple Lossless]."
It also outputs component video signals for "up to DVD-quality" video.
I thought it was impossible to bypass the iPod's DAC. "So did we," said Wadia president John W. Schaffer. "Then we…
Reference Recordings, the Bay Area-based audiophile label founded by John T. "Tam" Henderson in 1976, has adopted a unique approach to computer and music server playback. Later this month, the company will begin to market what they call "HRx" discs. Incompatible with conventional optical disc players, these are data discs containing WAV files intended for playback on computer-based music servers. Each HRx is a digit-for-digit copy of an original Reference Recordings 24-bit/176.4kHz digital master. The format is slated for audition during this week's CES. It can be heard in the TAD, FIM, and…
On January 4, BusinessWeek.com reported that Sony BMG Music Entertainment was dropping digital rights management (DRM) from "at least part of its collection." Sony BMG thus becomes the last of the big four music labels to do so—following Warner Music Group's example by less than a week. EMI and Universal Music Group began the stampede earlier in the year, pioneering DRM-free downloads with Amazon.com, among other partners.
We reported previously that both Pepsi and Wal-Mart have been rumored to have pressured the record labels to ditch DRM if they wanted to be included in Wal-Mart's…
The shoes are now dropping all over the place. We have previously reported that Warner Music Group had dropped DRM on its downloads, joining Amazon.com's Download store. Ten days ago, we also reported that Sony BMG had announced it was dropping DRM, although it declined to release any distribution details at the time.
Industry analysts speculated that the companies had been pressured by mega-mart retailer Wal-Mart and Pepsi to drop DRM—in Pepsi's case because it was going to give away 1 billion downloads in a promotion tied to the SuperBowl on February 4. The last time Pepsi tried a…