The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued two new/newly revised rules relevantor possibly relevantto the hi-fi industry.
As John Atkinson reported in the October Stereophile (see Industry Update), the FTC recently announced a revision to the "Amplifier Rule," with changes that took effect in August. It's the culmination of a process that lasted several years and a significant modification of a rule that has been in place for half a century. Amplifier manufacturers take note. Then in mid-August, the FTC announced the final version of a new rule aimed at banning fake reviews and fake product testimonials. It also forbids companies from intimidating people engaging in critical speech.
In the August issue's As We See It, Tom Fine and I encouraged readers to hold on to their physical mediathose black and silver discseven if they're stashed away in a closet or attic, replaced by hi-rez streaming. An important reason we gave is that with physical media (in contrast to streaming), you know exactly what you're listening toor at least you can know, with a little work.
Also if you want to, you can do a lot of work, since there is much to know and to learn, especially about vinyl records (and shellacs), and learning about themabout the labels and those arcane codes in the runout groove areais a big part of the music-collecting hobby. Serious record collectors are likely to have several pressings of favorite albums and to know the provenance of each one. With streaming, you're limited to whichever version they end up with, and usually they don't bother to tell you which version it is. An example is Rock for Light by Bad Brains, which is considered by Robert Baird in this month's Aural Robert.
Yesterday, I had a brief conversation, by text message, with my 26-year-old son. He had just walked by the Devialet shop at the Shoppes at Columbus Circle here in Manhattan. Knowing my interest in such things, he sent me a photo. The Devialet boutique seems more a design exhibit than a shop, in a high-ceilinged open area.
The shops at the Shoppes at Columbus Circle include Hugo Boss, Eileen Fisher, and Floga, which sells furs, among less-exclusive brands, though even the less-exclusive stores look fancy. Upstairs from the Shoppes is the Mandarin Oriental New York Hotel, where rooms cost about $1k/night and up, and some notable restaurants, among them Thomas Keller's Per Se, and Masa, a three-star Michelin restaurant where dinner costs as much as a room at the Mandarin Oriental, per person.
Devialet is the only trace of the hi-fi industry not only in that mall but in that part of town. Innovative Audio, which carries Wilson, Focal, and D'Agostino, among other brands, is about a mile east, a 25-minute walk.
Physical media market shares, from 19732024. From riaa.com/u-s-sales-database.
When the CD is gone, and it will be soon, we'll miss it. New CD releases are winding down (footnote 1). In the classical world, the era of big, bargain-priced boxes of CDsa somewhat recent developmentis ending because, after a long, slow descent, retail sales have fallen off a cliff in the past year or so. In pop and rock, if you discover a new band you like, you may or may not be able to buy a CD. Perhaps they'll self-publish a few to sell at concerts; there's a better chance they'll have LPs, assuming they can get time at a vinyl-mastering studio and a pressing plant, both of which are booked to the max. CDs, though, are an afterthought if they're even that.
Vinyl records will likely stay around indefinitely as a collector's artifact, but new CDs are fading fast. This is momentous. CD will be remembered as the last mainstream physical music format. Its passing marks the death of physical music media.
If buying a hi-fi product from an internet retailer is like an arranged marriage, a hi-fi show is like speed dating. Not everyone, I realize, approaches hi-fi shows (or speed dating, for that matter) the same way, and anyway, the analogy between hi-fi and dating is far from perfect. Speed dating is how this year's AXPONA, America's biggest hi-fi show, held at the Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel & Convention Center (above) near Chicago in April, often felt to me as I moved from room to room. Every new system I heard had the potential to become a long-term relationship. Could I live with this one forever?
One of my coolest radio-related experiences happened just a few months ago, when, churning through FM stations in my car, I encountered a country-inflected male voice singing "Fast Car," the Tracy Chapman song. Rolling Stone dubbed "Fast Car" the 168th best song of all time. It has audiophile cred because its simple sonics (predominantly voice and acoustic guitar) and good engineering made it an important test track, used, eg, by Harman for listening tests and by others for assessing compression artifacts in MP3s.
Though I'm writing this in early March, this As We See It column will be published in the May issue, which is the issue that will go to AXPONA, America's largest audio show, held each non-pandemic year at the Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel & Convention Center near Chicago. This year's show takes place FridaySunday, April 1214. The show opens each day at 10am and closes at 6pm Friday and Saturday; Sunday's closing time is 4pm. If you're going to the show, don't forget to stop by the Stereophile booth, Location 9213 in the exhibit hall.
Recently, I found myself in an email conversation with two colleagues on the nature of reproduced audio. How should we think about it? The conversation was provoked by a "hybrid" (live and online) presentation of the Pacific Northwest section of the Audio Engineering Society called "What Does 'Accurate' Even Mean?" The presenter was James D. "JJ" Johnston, a distinguished researcher in the field of perceptual audio coding and a co-inventor of MP3.
Among many other honors, Johnston was selected to present the Richard Heyser Memorial Lecture at the 2012 AES conventionan honor shared by our own John Atkinson, who had given that lecture the previous year and was one of the participants in this email conversation. The other was Tom Fineso, it was me and two sound engineers.
A different kind of stream: Route 140 Wrentham at Pendleton Road Eagle Brook; image by Ernst Halberstadt, 29 March 1973, Wikimedia Commons
I recently received a letter (not yet published) suggesting a need for a glossary of newer hi-fi terms. Some audiophiles raised on physical media, it seems, are perplexed by descriptions of the new streaming landscape. Just yesterday, all we had to worry about was DACs and transports. Today we have servers, streamers, players, streaming DACs, and all that. That immediately struck me as a good idea, allied with a second reason: To avoid confusion, it makes sense for the industry to standardize the nomenclature. When we see the word "streamer," for example, we should all be thinking about the same thing.
So, here's a brief glossary of streaming-related devices.
On this page in Stereophile's December 2023 issue, contributing editor (and mastering engineer) Tom Fine and I described a press event at which Apple Corps (the Beatles umbrella corporation) presented the news about the (at the time) forthcoming new Beatles single and the forthcoming "remixed" reissues of the "Red" and "Blue" Beatles compilations. Tom attended the eventwhich, notably, was held at Dolby headquarters here in New York City, reflecting, apparently, Apple Corps' interest in Dolby Atmos. At the event, demos were presented in the Atmos format onlyno stereo.
A key point of that column was that Apple Corps, at leastand who knows how many others in the music industryare abandoning high-quality Atmos in favor of that streamed by Apple Music. Tom and I criticized this development in no uncertain terms, concluding that if Apple's lossy-compressed version of Dolby Atmos is what we're being offered, "we should hope for its demise."
In the midst of his December 2023 Gramophone Dreams column, Herb Reichert presented the results of an experiment. He was listening to the most recent version of Zu Audio's Denon DL-103, installed on his new-old Lenco. He hooked it up to the moving coil input of his SunValley SV-EQ1616D phono preamp, which apparently is intended for use with low-output MC cartridges since it loads them down with a 50 ohm shunt resistora heavy load for all but the lowest-impedance MCs. The rough rule of thumb for loading an MC cartridge, as many readers are aware, is that the load resistance should exceed the cartridge's internal impedance by about a factor of 10.
On September 27, 2023, executives from Apple Corps and Universal Music Group held a press event at the Dolby Theater in Manhattan. The event included Dolby Atmos demos of forthcoming Beatles releases. It included some big newsalthough the biggest news wasn't obvious at first.
Martin Colloms, pictured on HiFiCritic magazine's website.
A few months ago, the hi-fi world learned that Audio Research, perhaps the most storied hi-fi brand in US history (McIntosh would be the other choice), had a new owner. The company had overextended itself, then filed for "Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors"somewhat like Chapter 11 bankruptcy but different. The company was then acquired by a group led by a Canadian, Valerio Cora of Acora Acoustics. In the September issue's Industry Update, I wrote, "Audio Research, that great American hi-fi company, is now Canadian."
Not long after the issue came out, I received a note from Dave Gordon of Audio Research Corporation. With typical good humor, Dave suggested that my characterization was not correctthat ARC is not in fact Canadian. Why? Because Audio Research's parent company is based in ... Delaware?
It's an error commonly made in evaluating hi-fisystem performance: the failure to listen differentially. Differential as in compared to something else. "Something else" could be a different recording on the same system or (especially this) the same recording on a different system. The question is, what are you comparing it to? The point is: Do you really know what that recording sounds like?
In the excellent My Back Pages essay that closes this issue, Londoner Phil Brett writes, "I bought my first albums in my teens for £2 then sold them off years later for 50p each."
Why did he sell his records? "[I]n those days, most vinyl had the thickness of a butterfly wing without the quality. As I grew older, I went throughahemseveral relationships hence several changes of residence. The hassle of carting boxes of records around grew wearisome; CDs were so much lighter, and often, they sounded better."
Phil predicted Stereophile readers would be horrified by what he did those many years ago. Maybe sobut for many, the horror will arise from regretat the memory of doing the same thing themselves back in the day. As I did.