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Bravo and Bravado Music Servers

Media servers are one of the hottest trends in home entertainment, as mentioned by Jon Iverson last week.

Emeryville , CA–based Meda Systems, Inc. is among the companies on the leading edge of this technological frontier. On September 10, Meda introduced four new models of its Bravo and Bravado music servers, using new software developed for multizone applications.

Launched at this year's Custom Electronics Design and Installation Association (CEDIA) show in Indianapolis, the full-featured Bravo 16 and Bravo 20 music servers are intended for large homes with many rooms and listening…

Music Goes Cellular

In an era when music as instant entertainment enjoys increasing dominance over music as art, cellular phones have emerged as the latest purveyor of music on demand. Issues of sound quality mean little when the goal is to accumulate more and more files at an ever-accelerating pace and have ever easier access to those files.

On September 7, Apple, Motorola, and Cingular Wireless (currently serving close to 52 million US customers) introduced the first iTunes-equipped mobile phone. The Motorola ROKR enables owners to transfer up to 100 favorite songs from their computer's iTunes jukebox. The…

CD Recorders, DVD Changers Hot Items for Fall

Electronics dealers may have a great autumn if they load up on dual-well CD recorders and DVD carousel changers, two of the hottest audio fashion items. Major manufacturers like Kenwood, Onkyo, Denon,, and Harman/Kardon have all announced plans to deliver recorders and DVD changers by October, in time for the holiday season.

The growing popularity of DVD has induced many companies to remodel their CD carousel changers—long one of the best-selling categories in consumer audio—into DVD machines. Yamaha and Sony already have DVD changers on the market, and Onkyo dealers should soon have a 6-…

Doing a Daring Deal With the Devil?

Citing the desire to take advantage of the power of sharing audio files over the Internet, one of the larger independent record labels, TVT Records, announced last week that it has withdrawn its copyright claims against the file-sharing company Napster. TVT said that the basis for its decision to end the lawsuit and provide its support to Napster is "the new service Napster is evolving under the strategic alliance it recently announced with Bertelsmann AG." TVT points out that, since Bertelsmann is still technically a party to litigation with Napster, it becomes the first record label to…

University Expansion in Chicago Sparks Protest by Bluesman

Chicago's Maxwell Street district is considered by many to be the birthplace of Chicago blues. But the old neighborhood is in danger of permanently losing some of its historic buildings, thanks to expansion plans by the University of Illinois at Chicago. The potential loss of the neighborhood has sparked protests by a coalition of blues musicians, including a hunger strike by 69-year-old APO Records artist Jimmie Lee Robinson.

Robinson began his fast Friday, August 18, to draw attention to threats posed by the expansion of the university's south campus into the area. The expansion will…

Sony and Sun Join Forces

Feeling the need to hook your audio system directly into a website for music files? Last week, Sony Corporation and Sun Microsystems announced plans to further collaborate to provide digital consumer-electronics appliances with direct access to Internet-based content and services. The companies say that the first phase of this cooperation will involve the development of home gateway software, running on appliances such as set-top boxes (connected to a home entertainment system), that will support a combination of home networking and network server technologies.

Specific technologies to be…

This Week's Sony DRM News

It has now been over a month since Mark Russinovich broke the story about Sony BMG's DRM software that installed root kit code onto consumers' hard drives—exposing infected computers to malware intrusions and reporting back to Sony's servers via spyware installed without consumers' knowledge or consent. Rather than growing stale, however, the story just keeps going and going as new details come to light almost every day.

This week brought news that New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer, like Texas AG Greg Abbott, is unhappy about the company's XCP "copy protection." Abbott has…

Blumenthal's First Two <I>Listener's Guides</I> Now Available

Author and television producer Howard J. Blumenthal has completed his Jazz and World Music CD Listener's Guides, the first two volumes in a four-volume series. The publications include brief biographies of the top artists in each genre, arranged alphabetically, and hundreds of short reviews of the discs the author considers essential.

"Only the best CDs are included---if a CD is not worth owning, it's not included in the book," Blumenthal states on his Web site, where viewers can read approximately thirty sample reviews. The $14.95 guidebooks are intended to help music lovers build…

Otis Blackwell, 1931–2002

Otis Blackwell, the prolific songwriter who helped propel the careers of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, died Wednesday, May 9 in Nashville. The cause of death was an apparent heart attack, according to a spokesman for St. Thomas Hospital. Blackwell was 70.

He had been in the St. Thomas emergency room several times recently, the Nashville Tennessean reported. Blackwell had been in ill health since suffering a debilitating stroke in 1991, the year after he moved to Nashville to establish a new record label with Col. Tom Parker, Elvis Presley's former manager.

Blackwell is…

Satellite Radio News

Satellite radio services Sirius and XM both appear headed for a healthy future. The companies both report robust growth in new subscribers. Sweetheart deals with automakers and car rental agencies will expose ever-increasing numbers of consumers to the benefits of commercial-free music.

On August 5, New York City–based Sirius Satellite Radio announced that it had gained approximately 37,000 new subscribers in the second quarter and was on track to reach its goal of 300,000 total subscribers by year's end. Total subscribership was 105,186 at the end of the second quarter, Sirius president…