On July 31, Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN), chairman of the senate's subcommittee on investigations, began an inquiry into the trade group's mass launch of subpoenas against ordinary citizens, accusing them of piracy or complicity in the violation of copyrights. Under provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), violators could be fined anywhere from $750 to $150,000 per individual song downloaded from…
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The campaign by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to litigate music downloading out of existence has drawn the attention of legislators in the nation's capital.
Hilary Rosen, president and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), must feel like Sisyphus playing an endless game of "Whack-A-Mole." Her job recently has been to patrol the digital world for music copyright violators, especially those pesky pirate MP3 websites on the Internet. It seems that each time they find and eradicate a horde of copyright violators, hundreds more pop up faster than you can say "information wants to be free."
For folks like Rosen, it's bad enough that we have legions of college students zipping copies of untethered MP3 music files around the…
In his review of the Sharp SM-SX100 digital integrated amplifier, Michael Fremer asks: "why would a sharp mind offer a $15,000 integrated digital amplifier to a reviewer who has been characterized in the audio press as the 'self-proclaimed Analog Messiah' and a 'hyper-Luddite'?" Would Fremer actually cotton to a digitized vinyl recording? Read Fremer's report for the startling conclusion.
CDs retailing for $6.99? For years now, Naxos has built its reputation on bringing high-quality—yet bargain-priced—music to audiophiles. In his interview, "Amazing Stuff: Klaus Heymann of Naxos," Sam…
Sometimes a product can take a while to reach its potential. As Jonathan Scull writes, "First, the Accuphase DP-75V CD player took a full two weeks to warm up and pull its act together. If anything, it was too polite, warm, and over-the-top bloomy when I first lit it up. The '75 requires a long warm-up period. But wait . . . just wait for it." When the wait was over, J-10 filed his observations in detail.
John Atkinson found the Mirage MRM-1 loudspeaker simply "drop-dead gorgeous." But it takes more than a loudspeaker's looks to satisfy JA, who reveals all in this review from the…
Two scuttled mergers in the past year haven't damaged the profit picture for EMI Group PLC. Neither has a global slowdown in music sales. EMI announced May 22 that it expects to see a 5.7% increase in pretax profits for its fiscal year ended March 31: £259.5 million (US $374 million), up from £245.4 million (US $353 million) a year earlier. EMI's sales for the year rose 12% to £2.67 billion (US $3.84 billion).
It's not coincidental that the company's North American market share has grown from 9% last year to 10.8% at present. EMI's share of the world market now stands at 14.1%, up from…
Stereophile magazine is pleased to announce that senior contributing editor Jonathan Scull has joined its full-time staff as senior editor. As of April 19, 1999, he will be based at parent company Emap Petersen's office on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan's Flatiron district.
A lifelong audiophile and music lover, Scull has been contributing equipment reviews, features, and interviews to Stereophile since December 1993. Prior to joining Stereophile he wrote reviews for The Abso!ute Sound, and has also had articles published in Gramophone and The Atlantic Monthly.
As part of his new…
Satellite startup XM Radio got a nice Christmas gift on December 24—an infusion of $450 million in new financing that should sustain it well into 2004.
Company principals have worked overtime the past few months to seal a deal that would enable them to stay in business long enough to carve a viable share of the nascent satellite radio business. Once rumored as a candidate for bankruptcy, XM Satellite Radio Holdings, Inc. has secured funding in two parts: $200 million from investors and $250 million in payment deferrals and credit facilities from General Motors Corporation, a major XM…
Judging from the e-mails we get, some folks wonder why Stereophile's website continues to cover the advance of such lo-fi formats as MP3 as well as the problems encountered by companies like Napster as they tangle with the music business. But consider this: a new study reports that the market for digital music players will grow to $6.4 billion in 2005—more than 34 times 1999 shipments—which is also nearly 80% of the $8 billion reported for sales of all audio products, including portables, from last year (see previous article).
At current industry growth rates, that would indicate that two…
In the classic textbook example, the Doppler effect is demonstrated by an increase in both pitch and volume (or amplitude) of a train's whistle as it approaches a station, followed by a decrease in pitch and volume as it moves away. This effect---the shift of a frequency emitted by a moving object---leads to a fundamental flaw in audio technology. A midrange driver behaves like the approaching-and-departing train when it attempts to reproduce varying frequencies. When the driver is fed simultaneous 400Hz and 2kHz tones, the forward movement of the cone at the lower rate modulates the 2kHz…
San Diego-based MP3.com, a premier website for distributing the music of unsigned bands, has announced a new program called Beam-it, via which copies of commercial CDs will be stored at the site. The copies will be instantly available to customers who have purchased the music from affiliated online retailers, company officials said. About 40,000 CDs have already been archived on the site.
The purported goal is to create a central Internet content library that music lovers can tap into with any computer—in other words, making MP3.com a personal radio station or jukebox for registered users…