Among the items auctioned was Stereophile columnist and record company owner John Marks' unique offer of a personal concert and evening with the world-renowned…
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Following the tragic events of September 11 last year, Audio Asylum and Audiogon co-sponsored a charity auction of audio equipment to benefit the NY Firefighters' Fund and other related charities. Manufacturers, dealers, magazine writers and editors, and audiophiles donated equipment, recordings, and memorabilia for sale, and as reported on this website, the auction ultimately raised almost $175,000 for 9/11-related charities.
On May 23, the Juilliard School of Music announced the selection of 18 instrumentalists who will form the core of the newly-created Juilliard Jazz Orchestra. As orchestra members, the musicians will benefit from tuition-free study at the school's recently established Juilliard Institute for Jazz. The creation of the institute—a collaboration of the Juilliard School and the "Jazz at Lincoln Center" program—is an indication that the prestigious institution is further acknowledging the importance of jazz, an indigenous American genre that many critics have called "the classical music of the…
Naxos, the world's leading distributor of classical music, has just signed a worldwide digital distribution deal with the Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA), which will use its Digital Distribution Dashboard (D3) technology platform to distribute and manage music files from the Naxos family of distributed music labels. The deal entails distributing titles to many of Naxos' 22 Digital Service Providers, including Sony Connect, Rhapsody, iTunes, Napster, and Microsoft (which charges consumers the lowest download price of all: $4.99 for an entire Naxos CD).
Kevin Arnold, IODA's…
Less than a week after launching major copyright-infringement litigation against several large Internet service providers (ISPs), member companies of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) abruptly withdrew their lawsuit because an offending offshore music site had even more abruptly gone dark.
In a precedent-setting legal maneuver, major record labels filed suit in US District Court in New York in mid-August against AT&T Broadband Corporation, Cable & Wireless USA, Sprint Corporation, Advanced Network Services, and UUNET Technologies, in the hope of securing an…
The HI-FI Show 98, the sixteenth put on by UK audio magazine Hi-Fi News & Record Review, sedately opened its trade days this morning in the Renaissance and Excelsior hotels on Bath Road near London's Heathrow International Airport. No, that's not a change in venue, it's yet another name change for the hotel that first hosted the "Penta Show" and, more recently, the "Ramada Show." However, this year's show will be the last at the site, as the new owners do not seem interested in hosting large-scale events at all. Next year the show will be moving---to a destination that nobody's…
In an article published in The Wall Street Journal on March 1, Ethan Smith suggested that consumer electronics companies need to recapture music lovers who have sacrificed audio quality in search of convenience by embracing portable devices such as the iPod.
Smith wrote: "When it comes to music, consumers are increasingly trading quality for quantity. Many would rather have the ability to store thousands of songs on portable devices—and have a constant soundtrack to their lives—than own stacks of CDs and listen to high-quality sound tethered to an expensive living-room system."
Smith…
As Shannon Dickson puts it, the Audio Artistry Beethoven loudspeaker system "is a four-piece, bi-amplified, dynamic dipole design which has been taken to the nth degree of refinement." After much time spent reveling in the speaker's sonic splendor, Dickson arrives at his aural conclusion.
Chip Stern writes that some audiophiles like to keep it simple when it comes to components, arguing that they "don't want racks of gear or snake pits full of cables and interconnects," and that they also "don't want to have to futz around with all this nonsense and still not end up with real system synergy…
Four short years ago, rock band Metallica angered part of its fan base by going after downloaders who used the online file-trading service Napster. At that time, the band provided Napster with the screen names of 335,000 users reputed to be pirating Metallica's music, and demanded they be removed from the service. The group was also the first to sue the fledgling company.
Metallica fans called for a boycott of the band's music and it was the beginning of the end for Napster, which was eventually squashed and has been reborn as a pay-for-music service. Metallica will now try to clear its…
You may have noticed recent news items about proposals to deregulate the electrical power industry. You may have received solicitations to sign on with some start-up utility you never heard of, promising 10% to 40% reductions in your electrical bill. The model for this deregulation---if it comes to pass---is the long-distance telephone industry.
How might something like this be technically feasible? In North America, the majority of electrical utility companies no longer serve simple local jurisdictions. Except for extremely remote communities, electrical power grids are interconnected…