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Meridian Announces New Key Appointments for American Operation

At 9am on May 14, Meridian Audio announced that Walter Schofield will be assuming the position of President of Meridian America at the company's Atlanta office on June 1. Jeff Dean will run Meridian's newly established Hollywood office.

Schofield was previously vice-president of sales and marketing at Mark Levinson, a division of Harman Specialty Group, which restructured its operations in January 2008, closing facilities in Bedford, MA and Billerica, MA, and consolidating operations to its Northridge, CA campus.

Jeff Dean comes to Meridian from the entertainment industry, having…

Dealer Events For May/June

Due to an error in laying out the June issue of the magazine, the following announcements were omitted from the June issue's "Industry Update Calendar" section:

FLORIDA
• Friday, May 16, 6–10pm: Krell and Audio Visions South will team up with Modern Times Gallery (1962 Main St., Sarasota) to host The Art of Sound, an art opening and product demonstration featuring an all-Krell system. For more info, call (813) 876-5236.

ILLINOIS
• Saturday–Sunday, May 17–18: Essential Audio (Barrington) will host Darren Censullo of Avatar Acoustics for an open-house seminar on system-…

VSAC 2008 For Everyone

After a four-year hiatus, the Vacuum State of the Art Conference and Show has been resurrected. Scheduled for next weekend, May 24–26, at the Hilton Hotel in Vancouver, Washington, just across the river from Portland, Oregon, VSAC owes its renewal to audio enthusiasts and software company owners Carolyn S. and Michael Kilfoil, who have taken over from founders Dan and Eileen Schmalle.

One of VSAC's foci is on do-it-yourself (DIY) builders and designers. With the exception of such well-known companies as Cardas, deHavilland, and Audio Note UK, many of the show's commercial exhibitors and…

Hear the HDTracks Difference

We have written about HDTracks.com previously, but that was before the site went public. This morning David Chesky notified Stereophile that it is offering, for a limited time, a free "HDTracks Ultimate Download Experience."

I fall for that "free" term all the time on the Internet, only to discover that, in order to get that "free," I have to divulge information I'm not comfortable giving—like my credit card info. David Chesky explained that the Download Experience isn't like that. "All you have to do is register your email address and you can download the eight tracks and get a 20%…

Steinway Buys ArkivMusic

Steinway Musical Instruments, Inc. announced May 19 that it was acquiring online classical retailer ArkivMusic, LLC for $3 million in cash at closing and three annual payments of $500,000.

ArkivMusic has been one of the recording industry's few success stories, the result of its core staff's passion for classical music and its realization that the old model of shipping product all over the country looking for customers was grossly inefficient. ArkivMusic not only utilized the Internet's efficiencies, but it created a unique "on-demand" manufacturing model wherein CDs are created after the…

AIX Records gets Multichannel Excellence Award

Sometimes, wonderful things go unnoticed. Thus did Stereophile miss that, in June 2007, at its 31st annual conference, in London, UK, the International Audio Engineering Society issued two Awards of Excellence in the category of Professional Engineering. One, which we learned about from a Minnetonka Audio press release, went to Dorian Records (see the May 2008 issue of Stereophile, pp.14–15). The other went to AIX Records of Southern California. The award is for John Gorka's The Gypsy Life, one of more than 50 high-resolution recordings available from AIX in DVD-Audio/Video surround sound and…

Bo Diddley:1928–2008

Some musicians are remembered for a single remarkable album; some are remembered for a hit song—Bo Diddley will always be remembered for a beat. That eponymous beat—a rhumba-inflected Bomp a-bomp-a-bomp, bomp, bomp—may well have been "the most plagiarized rhythm in rock," as Rolling Stone claimed in 2005.

Diddley was born in December 1928 as either Ellas Otha Bates or Otha Ellis Bates (like many details of Diddley's life, he recounted several versions of the story). He was raised by his mother's first cousin, Gussie McDaniel, who became his legal guardian when he was six. He eventually…

Decisions, Decisions

It has been an action packed week on the judicial copyright battlefield. One June 11, a federal district court upheld the first sale doctrine , ruling in UMG v Troy Augusto that sales of promotional CDs did not constitute a copyright violation.

For years, record labels have distinguished promotional copies of recording with a sticker or stamp proclaiming "promotional use—not for resale." Sometimes the promo copies have bonus tracks not on the retail recordings, sometimes they have different art, but frequently the only thing that distinguishes them is the stamp or sticker (or, on LPs, a…

"Making Available": It's All Over—or Is It?

On June 11, Recording Industry vs the People, Ray Beckerman's popular blogspot site covering the recording industry's ongoing series of litigations, revealed that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) had voluntarily and "without prejudice" filed a motion on May 27 to dismiss its ongoing complaint, Warner v Cassin, which maintained that posting files to a peer-to-peer network was distribution of those files, whether or not actual distribution occurred. This is known in copyright law as "making available."

If the trial had continued, Warner v Cassin would have been one of…

T.H.E. Show to Audiophile Societies: Come on In!

T.H.E. Show, aka The Home Entertainment Show, has put out a welcome mat for members of "authentic Audiophile Societies throughout the globe."1 Scheduled for January 9–11, 2009, in Las Vegas, the same dates as the Consumer Electronics Show down the road, T.H.E. Show has for the first time offered members of audiophile societies paid access to over 100 anticipated active-display suites in both the St. Tropez and Alexis Park hotels.

Society members will also be able to buy products from a number of vendors of software and rare LPs and CDs; their Alexis Park salesroom, the Parthenon, is…