It's no secret that SACD is Sony's baby, so Jonathan Scull was eager to get his hands on the first SACD player not made by Sony: the Marantz SA-1 SACD player. Writes J-10: "Man, is this thing gorgeous! The SA-1 weighs in at a hefty 40 lbs, with a rich, satiny champagne…
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Choice is good, or so would go the common wisdom. But as John Atkinson points out in "The Crazy You Get from So Much Choice," when applied to diapers and DVD-Audio, choice can quickly develop into a nightmare in which comsumers simply walk away from the shelves, unable to make a decision. Will DVD-Audio suffer such a fate?
Many audiophiles—especially owners of Hales loudspeakers—have wondered whether or not the brand will be revived, in view of a recent announcement by Audio Video Research of Ann Arbor, Michigan that it has acquired the assets of Wadia Digital and plans to resume production and product development of the revered name. Wadia acquired Hales (two of whose products were still Stereophile "Recommended Components" as of October 2000) last year, just a few months before financial difficulties put Wadia into a nosedive from which it could not recover.
Wadia may now be back but will Hales? No one…
There's traditional AM and FM radio, there's XM and Sirius satellite radio, and there are various cable and satellite dish "radio" music services. And finally, there's HD Radio.
Having invested over 10 years in development, and one year after gaining initial approval from the FCC, iBiquity Digital and several of its industry partners, including Texas Instruments, Philips, Kenwood, JVC, Onkyo, and Panasonic, plan to introduce HD Radio technology to the consumer market during the 2004 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on January 7.
As sole developer and licenser of HD Radio—also…
Among major American cities, San Francisco probably ranks near the top in culture per capita. It's therefore no accident that an Internet venture billing itself "the world's first website journal of classical music criticism" should have originated there. The site, San Francisco Classical Voice, is celebrating its first six months online.
Backed by the SF Foundation Community Initiative Funds, the non-commercial site is devoted solely to in-depth reviews of live performances of classical music---including opera, symphonic works, chamber recitals, and occasional solo pieces. Although a…
Last week, Florida consumer-electronics retailer Sound Advice announced that it has reached an agreement in principle to acquire Scottsdale, Arizona–based Showcase Home Entertainment, LLC, a privately held "upscale" retailer of consumer electronics and custom design services. Sound Advice, founded in 1974, currently operates 24 Sound Advice stores and four specialty stores under the Bang & Olufsen name throughout Florida.
Sound Advice says that, in addition to currently operating two home-electronics stores in Scottsdale and Chandler, Arizona, Showcase is presently engaged in…
On November 7, four months after a Supreme Court decision determined that file-sharing services could be held liable for the actions of their users, Grokster agreed to stop distributing its software and to pay $50 million in damages.
Grokster's settlement will not halt Grokster users' ability to copy movies, CDs, and software from one another's hard drives, due to the decentralized nature of peer-to-peer file sharing. That genie is long out of the bottle. According to the BBC, online analyst BigChampagne reported that peer-to-peer networks had logged over 9.3 million users in October 2005,…
The West Coast's Good Guys aren't feeling so well. The 79-store chain reported a 31% drop in net earnings for the quarter ending December 31. Gross margins dropped to 23.4% of sales, as compared to 24.7% in the same period the previous year.
Same-store sales were down 2%, an especially disturbing trend for Good Guys stockholders. Consumer-electronics retailers typically do the bulk of their annual sales volume during the period leading up to the winter holidays. The company's stock closed Friday, February 5 at $4.03, far below its 52-week high of $15.75.
Good Guys president Robert…
For quite a while now, Pioneer and Marantz have stuck their necks out with the few universal SACD/DVD-A/DVD/CD players available. Not any longer, as Onkyo, Teac and Yamaha join the club with new machines, aimed at consumers hedging their bets as to who will win the high-rez format wars.
Last week Onkyo officially announced the introduction of the DV-SP800 universal player, which decodes SACD, DVD-Audio discs, and MP3 CDs in addition to conventional DVDs and CDs. The company says the progressive-scan DV-SP800 is the company's top-of-the-line DVD player.
For audio reproduction,…
Kal Rubinson gets right to the point: "I am biased: On very little evidence, I remain convinced that, in the near future, high-quality music reproduction will be multichannel." The Meridian Digital Theatre surround-sound music system is therefore a product that puts Kal's vision to the test. Kal details the system, which consists of two DSP6000 front L/R speakers, one DSP6000C center-channel speaker, two DSP5000 speakers used for surround, the Reference 800 DVD/CD player, and the Reference 861 System Controller. But does the Meridian system live up to his expectations regarding the…
Imagine this: You're a modern kind of audiophile, and your music library is loaded and sorted (without any compression, of course) onto a hard-disk–based audio system which is networked throughout the house. You've also got a hard-disk–based audio system in your car.
When planning a trip, you create a playlist on your home audio system and, using a wireless connection, send the tunes out to your garage and directly onto your car's hard-disk player. To get a few extra hours worth of music ready for the road, you also use a little judicious compression, which is hardly noticed in the car's…