Throwback Thursday

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Throwback Thursday
Charlie's Playlist: Man vs. Machine
Michael Antonoff  |  Apr 01, 2021  | 
It didn’t rise to the level of Kasparov versus Deep Blue, but still, it was another example of man vs. machine. This time it was radio DJ Charlie Bermant playing music from 1967 versus playlists I asked two different smart speakers to generate.
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Throwback ThursdayVintage Gear
Rare B&W Speakers Anchor Skyfi’s System of the Week
SV Staff  |  Sep 19, 2019  | 
The super-rare Nautilus Signature 800 Edition of B&W’s iconic 800 Series speaker is the star of the show in a “System of the Week” recently featured by New Jersey-based vintage audio specialist Skyfi Audio.
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Stream OnThrowback Thursday
Flashback 1999: MP3-for-All
Mike Mettler  |  Jul 25, 2019  | 
Twenty years ago, Napster introduced the world to unlimited file-sharing — and the music business has never been the same since.
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Throwback Thursday
Flashback 2005: YouTube Is Born
SV Staff  |  Apr 25, 2019  | 
With more than a billion users and 2 billion views a day, YouTube is a force to be reckoned with but its humble beginnings gave no hint of what was to come.
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Throwback Thursday
Flashback 2006: Toshiba Launches HD DVD
SV Staff  |  Apr 18, 2019  | 
Thirteen years ago today, Toshiba introduced the first HD DVD players in U.S. stores with high hopes that the new format would be the high-definition successor to the wildly popular DVD and conquer the rival Blu-ray format championed by a coalition of nine companies, including Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, and Samsung.
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Throwback ThursdayVintage Gear
Is This the Holy Grail of Classic American Hi-Fi?
SV Staff  |  Mar 28, 2019  | 
Skyfi Audio thinks so. The New Jersey-based vintage audio specialist recently showcased this wonderfully nostalgic rack of classic Marantz components.
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Throwback Thursday
Flashback 1997: DVD Players Go On Sale
SV Staff  |  Mar 21, 2019  | 
Twenty-two years ago this week, the first DVD players were introduced in the U.S. after numerous false starts and delays over copyright concerns raised by Hollywood movie studios. DVD offered an upgrade in picture quality over VHS tape plus the convenience of a CD-like disc that wasn’t prone to wear and made it quick and easy to navigate through content, putting an end to tedious rewinding and fast-forwarding.
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Throwback Thursday
Flashback 2010: Apple Sells 10 Billion Songs
SV Staff  |  Feb 28, 2019  | 
Nine years ago this week, Apple announced that “music fans have purchased and downloaded over 10 billion songs from the iTunes Store.”
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Throwback Thursday
Flashback 2000: Super Bowl Broadcast in HD for the First Time
SV Staff  |  Jan 31, 2019  | 
Super Bowl XXXIV is historic not only because it is the Ram’s one and only Super Bowl triumph, but because it marked the first time the Super Bowl was broadcast in glorious high-definition…
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Throwback Thursday
Flashback 1984: Apple Unveils the Macintosh
SV Staff  |  Jan 24, 2019  | 
Thirty-five years ago today, Apple started selling a computer that would redefine home computing and inspire future tech products with its graphical user interface, integrated screen, and mouse controller, which introduced a new way navigate the PC.
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Throwback Thursday
Flashback 1984: Supreme Court Upholds Right to Tape
SV Staff  |  Jan 17, 2019  | 
The video cassette recorder (VCR) seems quaint today but 35 years ago today the Supreme Court handed down a landmark 5-4 decision that upheld the consumer’s right to record TV shows (and ultimately other video content) for personal use — a “right” we take for granted.
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Throwback Thursday
Flashback 1996: U.S. Grants MP3 Patent
SV Staff  |  Nov 29, 2018  | 
Twenty-two years ago this week, few people noticed an event that would forever change the course of distributed music when Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute was awarded a U.S. patent for a ground-breaking “digital encoding process” known as MPEG Audio Layer III, a.k.a. MP3.
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Throwback Thursday
Flashback 1998: A Compressed History of the Digital Music Player
Stewart Wolpin  |  Oct 25, 2018  | 
Photo courtesy of Todd Moore.

A momentous occasion in the evolution of recorded music occurred 20 years ago when a California district court ruled to allow the sale of a curious new portable music player in the face of opposition from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Here’s a compressed history of the events surrounding the birth of the MP3 player.

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Throwback ThursdayAudio Video News
Discogs: Cassettes Are Making a Comeback
SV Staff  |  Oct 11, 2018  | 
Just don’t tell Ken Pohlmann. Having recently proclaimed that Cassettes Are Not Making a Comeback, he’ll just laugh.
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Throwback Thursday
Flashback 1996: WebTV Aims to Televise the Internet
SV Staff  |  Sep 27, 2018  | 
Twenty-two years ago this month, Silicon Valley startup WebTV made a noble effort to bring the internet to the big screen with the launch of a set-top box that connected any TV to the internet. Noble because the World Wide Web was a wide-open frontier with only 36 million users worldwide. (Today, more than 4 billion people are online.) A good 92% of the American public had yet to even experience the internet let alone think about searching the web on their TV. Oh, and internet access in those days was via a “dial-up” phone connection.
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