Napster users are "45% more likely to have increased their music buying than non-users," according to the survey, which was released in mid-July. The RIAA is engaged in protracted litigation against San Mateo, California–based Napster, operator of a website with free software that allows users to share music over the Internet. The industry alliance claims that the proliferation of…
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The Recording Industry Association of America's lawsuit against Napster may be an attack on one of its best friends, if results of a recent study by research organization Jupiter Communications can be believed.
The Super Audio CD is gaining serious momentum.
With over 650 titles available from many record labels—including some majors—and with several inexpensive players now on the market, Sony Corporation has launched its next volley in what may very well prove to be an all-out format war. At a press conference held August 7 at the Fairmount Hotel in Vancouver, BC, the electronics giant announced its next-generation high-performance disc player and the impending release of almost two dozen SACD remastered recordings from one of the world's most renowned rock bands. The timing couldn't have been…
On Tuesday, March 29, 2005, the US Supreme Court heard the oral arguments for the case of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. This was widely covered in the mainstream news media, as well as all over the Web, but none of the synopses of the case did true justice to the give-and-take of the arguments, as I discovered this week when I stumbled upon a .pdf transcription of the complete oral arguments.
That transcription ran some 55 double-spaced, line-numbered pages, which made for heavy going for a layperson like myself. Fortunately, the P2P weblog offers a much more readable…
What's a home-entertainment show without an assortment of state-of-the-art audio demonstrations? EgglestonWorks has announced that its next generation Andra II speaker will be featured as part of what it calls an "unprecedented" demonstration of multichannel Super Audio CD (SACD) to be conducted during the upcoming Home Entertainment 2002 Show May 30 through June 2 at the New York Hilton.
The HE 2002 Show, an evolution of the fabled Stereophile Hi-Fi Show, is held each year to highlight the finest music and home-theater equipment available. Given SACD's growth in popularity among music…
Stereophile's John Atkinson teams up with world-renowned recording engineer Tony Faulkner to create a landmark Mozart recording that has just been released simultaneously on hybrid SACD/CD, and LP. In Project K622, JA recounts the entire process, noting, "The upbeat is the most magic moment in classical music making."
JA then gets his hands on the Arcam FMJ CD33 CD player, noting, "If you look at the Compact Disc medium in the 21st century, it is hard to resist the impression that it is well commoditized." So what can Arcam possibly offer to the audiophile at this point? JA explains.
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Earlier this month, at the Internationale Funkausstellung 1999 in Berlin, Germany, Syrinx music & media announced that, together with Panasonic/Technics and their new DVD-Audio players (see previous story), they successfully presented the world's first DVD-Audio disc. The Internationale Funkausstellung 1999 ran from August 28 until September 5 under the theme of "Your World of Consumer Electronics."
Syrinx reports that, as the DVD-Audio players were available only hours before the trade fair opened, it was uncertain whether the DVD-Audio disc would work in them. But it did, and Syrinx…
It is with great sadness that I report that Howard Mandel, the main man of manufacturer Altis Audio, passed away on September 27 after a long battle with, I believe, leukemia. No age was given in his obituary in the Danbury News Times (CT), but I believe Howard was in his early 50s.
Like many in high-end audio, Howard had followed his passion for music by turning it into a career, with Altis Audio specializing in digital playback components. I last chatted with Howard at the 2001 CES in Las Vegas, and his spirit and his energy seemed as high as they ever had been. According to the…
If Senator "Fritz" Hollings has his way, coming generations of electronic products will monitor their users' behavior and report possible copyright violations to some governmental regulatory agency. That's one of the more ominous provisions in Hollings' Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), introduced for consideration by the US Senate the third week of March. The bill goes far beyond the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998.
The new bill was introduced just a few weeks after Hollings and a Senate subcommittee had grilled top executives from the…
Igor Kipnis, virtuosic harpsichordist, prolific critic, and esteemed teacher died January 23. He was 71. According to his managing agency, Marilyn Gilbert Artists Management of Toronto, he had been suffering from cancer.
Kipnis, the son of Metropolitan Opera bass Alexander Kipnis, was born on September 27, 1930 in Berlin, where his father was singing with the Berlin State Opera. Although Jewish, the elder Kipnis was popular in Germany during Nazism's rise to prominence. Employing the stratagem of a vocal injury, the elder Kipnis fled Germany for Austria. When the Nazis annexed that…
The internet has been a boon to music lovers, who now can research almost any piece of music or artist, or shop for obscure discs and memorabilia from a plethora of sources. In an interesting twist on the additional material idea, Sony Music has been making supplemental content for selected CD releases available on a special website.
Called ConnecteD, the software residing on the Sony website allows content to be developed for any release, old or new, at any time. The content can be easily updated, since it resides on the Sony web server as opposed to the CD master. Even older titles can…