News

We are saddened to learn of the passing of inventor and audio entrepreneur Ray Dolby. Other sites have published full obituaries; I'd like simply to offer my memory of interviewing Ray back in the spring of 1977 for the English magazine Hi-Fi News, when Dolby Laboratories were trying to get the BBC interested in using Dolby noise reduction in FM broadcasting. Despite my being a neophyte audio writer, I was treated with courtesy and respect by a man who had forgotten more about audio engineering than I knew.

It was like old times. A major consumer electronics company was presenting a press conference in a high-rent venue to introduce its new audio products. These events used to be commonplace; now they are rare. But on September 4, in Manhattan's Jazz at Lincoln Center, to an audience that included record company executives from Universal, Warner, and Sony Music, HDTracks' Norman and David Chesky, Chad Kassem and Marc Sheforgen from Acoustic Sounds, whose new DSD download store was last week's big news, musician Herbie Hancock, and veteran mastering engineer Mark Wilder, Phil Molyneux, President and Chief Operating Officer of Sony Electronics since September 2010, announced that the company saw high-resolution audio as the future of recorded music playback.

Acoustic Sounds Inc. has today announced that it has launched a new high resolution download service, Acoustic Sounds Super HiRez, at www.superhirez.com

Many of David Wilson's highly acclaimed, long out-of-print recordings are poised to make old and new generations of audiophiles very happy. On August 1, the first two of a selected batch of Wilson Audiophile Recordings will return to circulation as high-resolution (176.4kHz/24-bit), CD-quality, and MP3 downloads. Distributed by Naxos via a host of mass-market and hi-res digital music stores, including Chandos' "The Classical Shoppe," eClassical24bit, HDMusic, HDTracks, HiResAudio, Linn Records, Onkyo, and Qobuz24bit, the first titles in the series are Recital, James B. Welch's disc of four centuries of organ music, and Beethoven and Enescu Sonatas, performed by violinist David Abel and pianist Julie Steinberg, this magazine's "Recording of the Month" for February 1984.

Stereophile's owner, Source Interlink Media (SIM), announced today that it is merging the two most powerful print and online media brands in the home technology field, Home Theater and Sound & Vision, to create a single powerhouse consumer brand dedicated to electronic entertainment.

Dr. Amar Bose, founder and CEO of the most successful privately-held consumer-electronics company in history, died Friday, July 12, at his home in Wayland, Massachusetts. He was 83.

Bose became interested in research in audio engineering and psychoacoustics after buying a stereo system and being disappointed by its sound . . .

It was a first-time venture for Elite Audio Systems, San Francisco’s newest and unique fine-audio emporium. On June 29, 2013, proprietor Michael Woods opened his doors to an event, co-organized with Peter Truce of the Bay Area Audiophile Society’s Analog Committee, that drew close to 60 folks to two mainly analog listening sessions.