Winners of the NuForce, OPPO and Kordz to be announced on Monday, August 9!!!!

Comment

Comment by Steve Scaggs on August 3, 2010 at 7:53am

Man O Man I have tried. My kids and nieces and nephews love the Home Theater but have no interest in high end audio. They joke about me and my hobby saying how much dad will spend on wire or a piece of gear. But when they play a cd on my rig there little faces light up. "How come I can't hear that on my Ipod"? CAUSE IT'S AN IPOD!!!
But I keep trying. Maybe one of my grandkids will see the light.

Comment by Craig Upshaw on August 3, 2010 at 6:45am

Are there plans for another contest in the near future? Since it is back to school time, how about a prize for introducing young people into our hobby?

Comment by james shawell on July 29, 2010 at 7:34pm

albums will never die,when u handle that lp that;s magic cd are cool because u put them in the player and they just play .with albums you have to handle them with care.love al format of music .i have cassettes,cd'ssony mini disc also albums depending on my mood .music forever

Comment by Jim Milton on July 29, 2010 at 4:17am

...and pricing! No CD should cost more than $10. The industry promised cheaper price for years and have just now started to drop prices. Not to mention the artists music. People buy a song or 2 from an album and skip the "filler" material. Why pay full price for an album that only has one or two songs on it that are worth listening to?
Could you imagine buying only one/two songs from a concept album like "Abbey Road"? Too much music today is made by "one hit wonders". After 5 years, many of these artists are delegated to the discount bin at Walmart. Poor recordings, poor mucianship and high prices...no wonder people download only what they want and the industry is left scratching its collective head!

...IMHO.

Comment by TwesT on July 28, 2010 at 8:34pm

The problem with the music industry isn't piracy; its recorded music! Too much (dynamic) compression and too little innovation. I have a suggestion for the record companies: Publish music on DVDs in two versions. One, an "iPod mix" for portable use that conforms to the current trend of eliminating all dynamics - you know, so it's LOUD (like on the radio) and suited for listening in noisy environments like the subway and outdoors. And, two, a "home" or audiophile mix that has all the dynamics; a mix that can be appreciated in a quiet environment. Thoughts?

Comment by Steve Scaggs on July 28, 2010 at 5:03pm

Digital music is convenient. Dump all of your cd's to a hard drive. Push a button and out comes music. I use it to an extent. I have music on my computer and can play that music on my main system in another room wirelessly. Very convenient. It comes in handy when you want to take music with you on a run or while your doing your weekly errands around town. But to me this is just music as a background friend. Something familiar to carry us through the day. And that's fine. I do it too.
But when it come time to sit down and listen. To immerse yourself in this other language, there are rituals that I hold to. I like to handle albums and cd cases and 45rpm sleeves. Depending on my mood it might be an all vinyl night. Which means getting up every twenty minutes to flip it. It means reading liner notes. And it also means, depending on your cartridge, hearing a different presentation of the music. A moving magnet cart might give you a warmer sound then a moving coil. The coil might reveal things that were once hidden. The cleaning of albums adds to the evening as does the smell of old album jackets. Digital can't give you any of this. A night of vinyl will connect me more with the music because I'm involved with the process. Kurt Von Eberstin as the question"who has the time?" I have the time. I make the time. It's that important to me.
There are a lot of great digital front ends out there and I have one of them in the OPPO bdp 83. I have a decent collection of SACD's and DVD'A and they get played a lot during the week. But I hope vinyl never dies. I know it won't in my house. With a good analog front end you can really get lost in the process of playing music. Well...at least I do.

Comment by TwesT on July 27, 2010 at 9:38am

Computers will replace the front end as we know it today. The only thing standing in the way is the existence of an inexpensive mangement tool that works teh way users want it to. Itunes is horrible because it doesnt allow you to specify how it will save your music (what's wrong with folders called - ?) and it wants to control what computer you use to put music on your devices. I just had it erase all my musice from my phone because I wasnt paying close enough attention to which computer i was using! Why does it demand such an invenstment of time and cycles? I just want to put my music on my device and listen to it. FooBar is great but is a pain to set up if you're not familiar with it and iPods dont play FLAC...
Ahh, but I digress. Personal computers witll replace the front end as we know it because they are so flexible, ubiquitous and otherwise ingrained in our lives. Not to mention, capable of providing an excellent signal to a dedicated D2A or producing a first rate analog signal with the installation of an appropriate audio card.

Comment by Michael Nemoy on June 11, 2010 at 12:16am

I am not sure that vinyl ever die, the CD/DVD/BD/Whatever-physical-media-is - will eventually.

Comment by Kurt Von Eberstein on June 9, 2010 at 7:44am

When we've reached the pinnacle of digital music reproduction in the realm of blu-ray, high rez downloads and the like, I find it difficult to understand the penchant toward vinyl again! I was a devoted vinyl man since the early 60's. Never a convert to casettes( let alone 8 track) and now, back to the difficult mechanics and "cleanliness" needed to play a record? It's a wonderful medium fo the elite tables & cartrdges and the n'th degree of investment in all the peripherals, but who has the time? I for one have excepted the peak systems of digital and I predict the vinyl market will flatten and remain a niche until it becomes the antiquity it essentially is.