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…
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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.
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…
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…
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…
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,…
Hitting newsstands this past weekend, the 2008 Stereophile Buyer's Guide is bursting with technical specifications for more than 5000 audio components. Loudspeakers, amplifiers, CD players, turntables—every component category is listed in full, and we worked extra hard this past summer to make sure that the products of every manufacturer were included in its 228 pages.
But wait—there's more. Members of Stereophile's indomitable team of experienced reviewers have each contributed an essay on a subject dear to his heart. In the cases of Michael Fremer, Jim Austin, and Stephen Mejias, it is…
The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) has taken major steps to ensure that the 2008 edition of its International Consumer Electronics Show, to take place in Las Vegas, Nevada, January 7–10, will provide a model for sustainable and energy-efficient practices. According to CEA president and CEO Gary Shapiro, the world's largest international trade show for consumer technologies is "the first tradeshow of our size to reduce our carbon footprint. We will do so by reducing energy consumption, increasing our recycling efforts, improving efficiency where possible, and making strides toward…
This week marks Stereophile's 10th year online.
In those 10 years we've posted thousands of reviews, industry news items, show reports and features, dating back to J. Gordon Holt's heyday in the 1960s (his "Down with Dynagroove!" piece from 1964 is an early classic).
Practically every writer who has reported and reviewed for the magazine is represented online in some form—125 at last count (or 127 if you include entries from Lucius Wordburger and Ziggy Stardust).
Once the Internet started gaining speed a few years back, rival online publications quickly began to condemn…
The recording label Deutsche Grammophon, founded in 1898, boldly ventured into the 21st century on November 28 with a new online store that eschews digital rights management (DRM) and offers MP3 downloads at 320kbps.
The numbers are impressive: over 2400 "albums" (1000 of which include PDF text booklets) including 600 "out of print" recordings (over 100 of which are unavailable elsewhere), 3000 artists, and 950 composers. The initiative, the press release stated, is "part of Universal Music Group’s ongoing market trials of DRM-free downloads, announced earlier this year." This initially…
When John Atkinson reviewed the Benchmark DAC1 USB digital/analog processor (watch for it in the January 2008 Stereophile), his test results raised some eyebrows at Benchmark. You'll have to read the review to discover what, but suffice it to say that Benchmark did some testing of their own and wrote us an interesting alert.
Director of engineering John Siau wrote, "We have discovered a very serious flaw in iTunes 7.5...[specifically] in the area of 16-bit truncation and/or operating system based sample-rate conversion…. Fortunately the truncation and sample rate conversion problems can…