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This Week
Midweek Update: Getting Into the Naxos High-Resolution Releases
Michael Berk  |  Sep 13, 2012

Naxos - the world's largest independent classical label - is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. While the company made its name on budget releases of recordings by Eastern European orchestras and rereleases (and occasional remastering) of out-of-print material, it's moved on to create a  strong catalog of contemporary music, and has embraced high-resolution releases, with a number of SACD and Blu-ray releases in the last few years. And, of course, they've jumped into the FLAC format. This week, HDtracks is paying homage to the label's achievements with a featured set of CD-quality and high-resolution releases from the label, spanning the 19th and 20th Centuries. 

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Grace Notes
Vintage Vinyl: The World's Oldest Recording, Revealed
Leslie Shapiro  |  Sep 13, 2012

A sound media historian at Indiana University recently made a remarkable discovery. Patrick Feaster was reading an article on early recording studios to help with a study he was doing on early Thomas Edison recordings.

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CEDIA 2012
CEDIA Expo 2012: A Wrapup in Pictures
Geoffrey Morrison  |  Sep 12, 2012

Another CEDIA behind us. Reports are saying attendance was up by 4% compared to 2011. Those of us who were there find that hard to believe, but perhaps it was the wider aisles and smaller booths that gave the appearance of fewer people.

Regardless of how many people were there, we saw a lot of cool stuff. And took a lot of pictures.

Well, I did anyway.

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Tech2
A Fix for Obsolete Docks
Brent Butterworth  |  Sep 12, 2012

Apple announced today that it’s switching from the 30-pin connector on the bottom of iPods, iPhones, and iPads to something more compact. You can hardly blame Apple’s designers, since that connector is more than a decade old. But the move will essentially obsolete millions of iPod/iPhone docks already in consumers’ homes.

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CEDIA 2012
CEDIA Expo 2012: An Incomplete Account of Some Trends
Michael Berk  |  Sep 12, 2012

The real story of CEDIA Expo 2012, in my opinion, was the way in which the traditional forces of custom integration and installation continue to respond to the flood of ever-more-capable products coming out of the consumer electronics sector, from wireless video and audio to cheap-and-cheerful iOS and Android propelled appliances.

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This Week
New Movies for September 11, 2012: Who's the Fairest of Them All?
Josef Krebs  |  Sep 11, 2012

Snow White and the Huntsman

"Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?" Snow White - at least in terms of this Blu-ray disc. The film itself is sometimes exciting and engaging, sometimes draggy, but where sound and vision is concerned, it's reference quality.

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Media Server Reviews
NAS Drives to Store Your Media Libraries
Barb Gonzalez  |  Sep 11, 2012
It was a steadily growing progression. The more I streamed movies and music to my media players and home theater, the more movies and music I downloaded. My movie folder was stuffed with high-definition videos. There were more songs than I could listen to in a month. My media libraries had grown to hundreds of gigabytes and were slowing down my computer.
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Vintage Gear
Sennheiser HD414
Steve Guttenberg  |  Sep 11, 2012
The Sennheiser HD414 was a game changer in 1968. In those days hi-fi headphones were all big and bulky, closed-back designs, and the compact HD414 was the industry’s first “open aire,” on-ear (supra-aural) headphone. It looked, felt and sounded like nothing else and forecast the future direction of headphone sound.
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This Week
New Music For September 11, 2012: Sixties Redux with the Monkees, the Velvets - and the Beatles
Mark Smotroff  |  Sep 11, 2012

Magical Mystery Cure

The really big news from overseas is that - FINALLY - The Beatles' legendary Magical Mystery Tour film extravaganza is being reissued with a proper remastering and a deluxe box set treatment.

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CEDIA 2012
CEDIA Expo 2012: Compact and Portable Audio
Brent Butterworth  |  Sep 11, 2012

The CEDIA Expo is supposed to be a showcase for custom home theater, multiroom sound, and home automation, but this year a lot of manufacturers didn’t seem to have read the rules. Instead of focusing on in-wall speakers or 12-channel amplifiers, they showcased wireless audio systems, desktop systems, and even headphones.

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