Horns for Dumbo: OMA opens a Brooklyn showroom
Oswalds Mill Audio, the Pennsylvania-based company that designs, manufactures, imports, and sells a range of vintage-inspired and mostly bespoke domestic playback gear, has opened a showroom in New York City. OMA Dumbo, named for its historic neighborhood (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), now occupies the entire top floor of an industrial building at 110 Bridge Street in Brooklyn, walkable from either the Brooklyn or Manhattan Bridge.
Hot Classical & Jazz Downloads
The long-awaited US launch of Passionato.comhttp://www.passionato.com">Passionato.com;, intended as the World Wide Web's "premier destination for classical music connoisseurs," has finally happened. Passionato, which has no membership fee, offers the largest collection of classical-music downloads in CD-quality, DRM-free FLAC and 320kbps MP3 formats yet assembled online.
Hot Damn, it's the June Issue
Chord's extraordinary DAVE"Digital [to] Analog Veritas [in] Extremis (Truth in Extreme)"D/A processor takes pride of place on its cover, but the June Stereophile is packed full of good stuff. Art Dudley reports on Peachtree's "Made in America" nova300 integrated amplifier; Herb Reichert and Jim Austin live with high-performance preamplifiers from PrimaLuna and PS Audio; Kal Rubinson checks out a two-channel AV integrated amplifier from Arcam; Ken Micallef reviews a truly loud speaker, the horn-loaded Rival from Volti; and Robert Baird listens to great-sounding vinyl reissues of recordings of the legendary pianist Bill Evans.
Houston Internet Company Will Bring MP3s to China
Houston's InterWeb">http://www.houston-interweb.com/">InterWeb Design has signed a joint venture agreement to bring MP3 audio to China. The three-way agreement, finalized in late February with a Chinese investment company and the Chinese government, will establish the first government-approved MP3 site in China.
Hovland Calls It Quits
The Hovland">http://www.hovlandcompany.com">Hovland Company is no more. Less than 10 full years after its incorporation, the manufacturer of highly coveted Hovland Musicap propylene-film and aluminum-foil capacitors and visually striking electronic components has dismissed its staff and closed the doors of its manufacturing facility and headquarters in Los Angeles.
How to Help Musicians--Updated
You probably heard the news: record claims for unemployment benefits, indeed, five times the previous record from 1982. Our economy has never been shut down quite so completely and suddenly. Those most affected are service workers: cooks, waiters, retail clerks—and the people who make the music we love.
How's That Again?
Researchers at the International Center for Hearing and Speech Research (ICHSR) have found that age-related hearing loss may be all (or at least mostly) in your head rather than a problem with your ears.
Howard Mandel of Altis Audio Passes Away
It is with great sadness that I report that Howard Mandel, the main man of manufacturer Altis Audio, passed away on September 27 after a long battle with, I believe, leukemia. No age was given in his obituary in the Danbury News Times (CT), but I believe Howard was in his early 50s.
Hybrid Vigor
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 mashups, or the manipulation of the musical genetic material of several different songs to create a new song, may be on their way out, because we've become infatuated with them.
I've Heard the Future of Streaming: Meridian's MQA
Meridian's Bob Stuart at the Manhattan launch, showing the law of diminishing returns regarding increasing the sample rate of PCM encoding.
In almost 40 years of attending audio press events, only rarely have I come away feeling that I was present at the birth of a new world. In March 1979, I visited the Philips Research Center in Eindhoven, Holland and heard a prototype of what was to be later called the Compact Disc. In the summer of 1982, I visited Ron Genereux and Bob Berkovitz at Acoustic Research's lab near Boston and heard a very early example of the application of DSP to the correction of room acoustic problems. And in early December, at Meridian's New York offices, I heard Bob Stuart describe the UK company's MQA technology, followed by a demonstration that blew my socks off.