It might be surprising to learn that portable CD player sales are taking off again in the UK. I cannot think of low pricing being the only reason (about 15 GBP), because nowadays you can have similarly cheap MP3 players or you can even have MP3 files on your mobile telephone. The official explanation is that many [...]
When Sony is Internet enabling some of its Bravia TV sets, it is at the same trying to bring us back to the 80s. I am talking about Sony’s great new idea called Blu-spec CD.
It is all about making CDs with blue lasers, because factories need to get rid of their now old red lasers to [...]
The audiophile community has a portion (significant percentage I might say) that are never happy with their system’s sound and are willing to pay for meaningless improvements that bring no changes whatsoever. The CD trimmer however is going to the limit, by trying to make your CDs more round and better balanced to avoid jitter! [...]
I didn’t mean to make any subwoofer owners sad for the weekend, but yes this is a crazy big subwoofer around which this guy builds his entertainment room… [Source: Royal Device via Gizmodo]
Denon is soon releasing in Japan the RCD-CX1 combo. It is the merging of the separate DRA-CX3 amp and DCD-CX3 SACD player, and will cost about $1,700. Power will be 75W/4ohms or 35W/8ohms.
Of course SACD is long ago a dead format, but since no changes were required from the DCD-CX3 player it is not an [...]
Neil Young is to release his previous material on Blu-ray discs. Is that big news for rock music fans? Neil Young is almost always big news, but not this time I am afraid… His fans already own his brilliant albums in vinyl and CD form. The transition from analog to digital took years and [...]
I have written before and will definitely not shut up repeating that MP3 music files have offered portability and quick download times but have been a huge step backwards in terms of sound quality. In audiophile terms, I find the iTunes phenomenon completely inexplicable. Paying so much for so poor quality files is a complete [...]
The Slip is Nine Inch Nails‘ new album. Nothing special so far. But hey, it is officially offered as a free download! And not in just one file format, so choose what suits you best:
MP3: nice and space saving for your portable player.
FLAC lossless: with the right codec, you can play this directly, but do [...]
Both SACD and DVD-Audio formats are effectively dead, but the question whether high resolution audio is distinguishably better that CD sound still lingers in the air.
The Journal of the Audio Engineering Society conducted a very interesting comparison in the form of year-long double blind ABX comparisons. The results? 50% of listeners found no difference between [...]
There is iPod and iPhone accessories everywhere we care to look. Do we need more? This post is evidence that we have reached that all critical point where going much further is overkill. Copulare is an audio rack manufacturer that has probably seen an opportunity to ride the wave of Apple’s mobile product success.
The price [...]
If you are old enough you will remember the time of hardware graphic equalisers as discreet components with loads of vertical slider settings and enough lights to impress virtually any friend.
FlashWear now is offering the SpeaQualiser. You cannot control frequencies in any way, it is just a passive but cool looking representation of the music [...]
Is DAB effectively dead? If we judge from what is happening in the UK, it is probably a matter of time. Although there are currently 6.5 million DAB receivers, defections towards other types of access to audio content have started to become intolerable.
Things of course needed not be like that. DAB was supposed to be [...]
We have already discussed here how well Amazon MP3 develops into a veritable iTunes threat and it was pointed out how nice it would be to have the service available universally. Apparently Amazon has been listening and is planning an international rollout for its well received MP3 service. Launched only in September 2007, Amazon MP3 [...]
Amazon prefers to keep things quite but has quite canily prepared the ground for a major offensive against the big enemy, who else… Apple’s iTunes. Sony BMG is the latest of the large music labels to join the Amazon camp with sweet DRM-free downloads. This means that now Amazon has access to the vast catalogues [...]
The Fraunhofer Institute brought the world the MP3 revolution so no reason not to listen up carefully to what they propose! Now they come up with a new audio format, the HD-AAC. The deal is lossless compression and 24-bit music content. Given that CDs are 16-bit, Fraunhofer’s promise that it is better than CD is logical. With [...]
