With Eiji Oue and the Minnesota Orchestra in mid-February sessions, RR will record music by Leonard Bernstein (Oue was Bernstein's last…
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Last week, Reference Recordings, of San Francisco, announced that it is planning five new symphonic projects to be recorded by "Prof." Keith Johnson in 88.2kHz, HDCD, 5-channel discrete surround sound. These will be released on standard two-channel CD in the coming year, and eventually on DVD-Audio disc. According to RR, with these ambitious plans, the company hopes to reverse the industry-wide decline in new recordings of classical orchestral music.
Earlier this year, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) tried something a little different and ran the 2002 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas during the week, starting on a Tuesday, instead of in its normal slot over the weekend. The hope was that the show would not compete with the normally crowded Las Vegas weekends, and would offer showgoers more flexibility in finding hotel rooms and taxi cabs.
Scratch that idea. The CEA has decided that you can't mess with tradition, and has reverted to a more familiar calendar, scheduling the 2003 CES to be held Thursday through…
Speaking at the Music 2.0 conference in Los Angeles on February 23, Yahoo Music's general manager Dave Goldberg startled listeners with a statement probably never previously heard from the head of a for-pay digital music service: Lay off the DRM.
"DRM is not a consumer value proposition, it’s a consumer cost," said Goldberg. "It creates a nice barrier of entry for the tech companies, rather than something that’s beneficial to labels, artists, or consumers."
Most of his talk was hardly revolutionary (listen to it here), but the part that caught our attention was his analysis of how DRM…
The audio tribe is converging once again in Las Vegas for one of its its three annual gatherings (the others being CEDIA-Expo and the Home Entertainment Show, of course), and so far so good. Although the show officially opens Tuesday this year, several of the major manufacturers took advantage of the calm before the storm to hold their press conferences on Monday.
First stop was a Panasonic presentation in the main convention center, where, in spite of the noise of booths being assembled all around, the company outlined its goals for a timid economy. DVD-Audio made its biggest splash in…
Last week, TDK announced that it is introducing extended-capacity, 80-minute/700MB multimedia and music CD-R discs this July. The new discs add 50MB, or 6 minutes of stereo music capacity, to the conventional 74-minute/650MB CD-R disc. TDK says it is the first manufacturer to offer extended-capacity CD-Rs, and points out that it has been supplying recording studios with 80-minute CD-Rs for music-mastering applications since 1996.(Stereophile's new 77+ minute Bravo! CD, featuring chamber music by Elgar and Mozart, for example, was mastered on a 700MB TDK CD-R.)
The company says its…
As 2004 wound down, the Los Angeles sheriff's department successfully conducted five simultaneous raids on illegal CD replication plants in southern California on December 15. Dubbed "Operation Final Release," the joint operation between the Southern California High Tech Task Force and the LA sheriff's department put 65 officers into action, closing down five optical disc replication facilities in LA and Orange counties suspected of churning out millions of pirated CDs, which were sold throughout the United States.
"Virtually unprecedented in size and scope, today's anti-piracy operation by…
Satellite radio got a boost toward wider market acceptance on February 16, when Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio announced an agreement to develop a unified standard for satellite radios. The current batch of satellite receivers can pick up transmissions from one of the providers, but not both. The next generation of receivers will expand the technology's reach by enabling reception of both companies' broadcasts.
The two have come to the realization that they must cooperate if the satellite radio sector is to grow. Sirius and XM Radio will combine their research and…
At massive gatherings like the Consumer Electronics Show, some truly newsworthy developments by small companies go unnoticed, overshadowed by splashy launches put on by bigger firms. One such is Be, Inc.'s "Home Audio Reference Platform" (BeIA HARP), an all-purpose computer audio system. HARP will let computers access and broadcast Internet-based audio and services, and will also let them play CDs, tapes, and LPs.
Be, Inc. is well known for its BeOS, a cross-platform operating system. The Menlo Park, CA–based company debuted its HARP system for consumer electronics manufacturers at the…
The Recording Industry of America's ongoing pursuit of music pirates bore fruit last week on Tuesday, July 7, when the organization collected $750,000 in settlements from three companies that had produced and marketed CD compilations of hit records. The RIAA also received $20,000 in restitution from Lloyd Schiffres, owner of Top Hat Productions, a disc-jockey supply house. Schiffres, who has been arrested three times, handed over 31 sets of his For DJs Only compilations.
ETV Network of Los Angeles and Promo Only of Castleberry, FL, cooperated with investigators and turned over a half-…
As almost any Stereophile reader could tell you, if the record labels want to stem the rushing tide of big-time music piracy, they should consider starting with lower CD prices at retail. In other words, lessen the incentives that drive the illicit music market, and eliminate a sizable percentage of the problem overnight.
Lowering prices may be a hard pill for the recording industry to swallow, but the alternative is looking grimmer with every passing day. According to new statistics released by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), 2001 saw global sales of…