IBM's Dac Pham said, "We believe a 10x performance over the PC, at the same power envelope, can be achieved. It will usher in a new era of media-centered computing." What's all the hubbub about, bub? A 90-nanometer 3.6GHz Pentium 4 occupies 112 square millimeters and…
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At last week's International Solid-State Circuits Conference, IBM, Toshiba, and Sony unveiled details of their new Cell processor chip—a device that The New York Times proclaimed would create "a new digital computing ecosystem that includes Hollywood, the living room and high-performance scientific and engineering markets."
Will the decline ever end for the music business?
On April 7, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) reported that sales of recorded music dropped 7.6% in 2003. Unit sales are off a cumulative 20% over the past three years, the London-based trade association reported. Worldwide sales of CD albums, which account for 86% of all recorded music, dropped 9.1%; CD singles dropped 18.7%. IFPI chairman and CEO Jay Berman described 2003 as "another difficult year" for the music industry, and blamed the slump on "the combined effects of digital and physical piracy and…
The past several months haven't been kind to the electronics industry. Most manufacturers are suffering from slow sales and backlogged inventory. But one company is painting a slightly different, if confusing, picture. Unless you've drastically slashed margins while quadrupling sales volume, the phrase "record quarterly sales but decreased profits" appears self-contradictory. Yet Sony Corporation is claiming exactly that for the last quarter of 2001, the company's third fiscal quarter. (Most electronics manufacturers begin new fiscal years April 1.) On Friday, January 25, Sony announced…
We recently received the following from Christos Skaloumbakas, President of the Audiophile Club of Athens, Greece. The ACA website is easy to navigate, with pictures and descriptions of members' systems---including listening rooms' floor construction and furnishings. Except for a few letters and opinion pieces, text is in clearly written English. The club is completely noncommercial, has no position regarding any of the usual audiophile controversies, and encourages open discussion. A love of music and a desire to share it are the only requirements for membership.---BW
The Audiophile…
Removal of Hazardous Substances (RoHS), a directive by the European Union (EU) that goes into effect on July 1, 2006, sounds like apple pie or motherhood—something that would be hard to argue against. And its expressed purpose of removing hazardous substances—lead and mercury, for example—from consumer products is assuredly a noble one.
Yet, mention RoHS to a specialty audio manufacturer and the air just might turn blue with intemperate language. "Do you know any way to visually examine for a cold solder joint if you're not using lead solder?" I heard one high-end manufacturer ask another…
The MP3 digital music format continues to gain momentum. Only two weeks ago, Thomson S.A., the international electronics conglomerate (parent of RCA and ProScan), announced a 20% investment in MusicMatch, Inc., the San Diego, California-based maker of management software for the upstart format. Last week Thomson took a further radical stance by announcing RCA's own MP3 player, the Lyra, to a gathering of more than 400 dealers at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas.
The move into MP3 is part of the company's larger strategy of embracing and promoting personalized entertainment. Products…
Evolutionary. That's the word that comes to mind after strolling about the Alexis Park, home of Specialty Audio exhibits at the 2001 Consumer Electronics Show. The revolutionary stuff usually makes its debut at the Las Vegas Convention Center; here, in the high-end halls, we find manufacturers and designers more interested in perfecting existing technology.
Nagra, for example, has reconfigured its acclaimed PL-P phono preamp as a line stage called the PL-L, using what appears to be the same chassis as the PL-P. At $6800 retail, the PL-L features one pair of balanced inputs, three pairs…
As I walked through the corridors of HE2005, I kept hearing audiophiles asking one another, "Have you heard Mark Levinson's demo yet?" Yes, that was Mark Levinson, the man, and the Burwen Bobcat was possibly the most discussed item at the Show.
"One of the problems I had as a high-end manufacturer," Mr. Levinson told me, "was that, with the exception of records and a few well-recorded SACDs, most music people listen to sounds bad. Part of the problem is obviously low-resolution sources, such as 128kbps MP3s, but it's a bigger problem than that. It has to do with the recording spaces, the…
Napster may be down for the count, but its millions of former members are happily swapping audio files elsewhere, according to an October 10 report from technology research firm Jupiter Media Metrix Inc.
The use of services such as Kazaa, Grokster, and Morpheus has risen by almost 500% since March, the report states. In August, a total of 6.9 million people used the services, while those using Napster dropped to 5.5 million, a decline of 49%. Morpheus is the rising king of the Internet underworld, with 2.3 million users in August, an increase of 186% since June. : Kazaa Media Desktop…
Back when DVD players were first released in the US, Classic Records was among the first companies to exploit the fact that early machines, though intended for the video enthusiast, could play a 24-bit/96kHz audio recording as well as movies (see previous story). These early high-resolution discs, which Classic called DADs, were intended to hold us over until DVD-Audio (then thought to be just around the corner) would finally hit the market. More than two years later we're still waiting for DVD-A, but Classic intends to be ready when it finally appears.
Working with recordings of the…