As rules of thumb go, this one is pretty infallible: By the time we've heard about it, a trend's hippest participants will think it's on the decline. That means that <I>mashups</I>, or the manipulation of the musical genetic material of several different songs to create a new song, may be on their way out, because <I>we've</I> become infatuated with them.
Depending on who you talk to, so far in the US, DualDisc has either been a success (according to the record labels) or a stumble (according to the press and manufacturers). Now Europe gets a chance to see what the fuss is all about.
Last week we asked about the oldest recording you listen to, this week, reader Saul Ziegler would like to know what is the most recent recording you have acquired?
Just what <I>is</I> the absolute sound, and how do you get there from here? What the heck are we looking for as we endure the mirth of others while purposefully setting up our high-end systems? Is it, indeed, the sanctified sound of acoustic instruments in real space? Can we ever really achieve that? Or is it the accurate realization of the signal on the master tape? Or—as was recently suggested at the New York Noise single-ended lovefest, covered in this issue's "Industry Update"—are some of us looking for the emotion and the artist's intent?
Although the term "professional" is often used as part of model designations in consumer electronics, the actual overlap between the audiophile consumer market and the <I>real</I> pro market is quite small. There are speakers in common use as studio monitors that no self-respecting audiophile would want to be caught dead listening to, and the typical audiophile loudspeaker would go up in smoke if asked to pump out the kind of volume that pro application routinely demands. To a lesser extent, the same applies to amplifiers: pro is pro and consumer is consumer, and ne'er the twain shall meet.
Onkyo released a tantalizing bit of news on February 25: Sometime before summer, it intends to release a remote interactive dock (RI) for "specified iPod models and many of the Onkyo products (as many as five million worldwide) produced over the past 10 years."
Last month, we <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/news/012405roundup/">reported</A> that audio engineers with a yen for magnetic tape were hoarding their remaining stockpiles in the wake of the Chapter 11 restructuring–inspired shutdown of the <A HREF="http://www.quantegy.com">Quantegy</A> plant in Opelika, Alabama. What a difference a month makes! Two new sources have come to the rescue.
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