News

But if you want their CD-quality streaming service, Deezer Elite, you can only get it through Sonos (sigh). So what are we getting from Deezer? Another $9.99/mo. 320kbps lossy streaming service (there's no free tier for US customers).

According to Ben Sisario of The New York Times, Apple is not buying Tidal. Seeing as Sisario covers streaming, and more, for the Times, I'd imagine his highly-placed sources are, well, highly placed. Time will tell.

The AES has just published a peer-reviewed paper by Dr. Joshua D. Reiss titled "A Meta-Analysis of High Resolution Audio Perceptual Evaluation" which concludes:

"The overall conclusion is that the perceived fidelity of an audio recording and playback chain can be affected by operating beyond conventional levels."

In other words, yes, people can hear the difference with hi-res. My ears and brain and experience rejoice in this positive reinforcement!

The Berklee College of Music’s Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship (BerkleeICE) has formed the Open Music Initiative (OMI) to create "a global, open sourced platform, providing technology for a shared ledger of music creators and rights owners". Why? According to Ty Roberts, Universal Music Group's Chief Technology Officer, "...to promote development of comprehensive, fair and efficient compensation structures to capture the value generated by music and music-related content, and properly reward the creative talent responsible for it." Better late than never!

From the press release:

TORONTO, Canada – June 1, 2016 – Bluesound, a leading manufacturer of wireless multi-room music systems, announced today that MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) music will be supported for wireless streaming on all Bluesound Players starting June 1, 2016. MQA has been heard on Bluesound by thousands, with successful listening demonstrations in major cities around the world. Now, Bluesound and MQA are excited for consumers to experience the magic of original studio recordings in the home.

In a press release dated 05/26/2016, Schiit Audio have spoken out about their position relating to the adoption of MQA (see review). From the press release:

"May 26th, 2016, Valencia, CA. Today, Schiit Audio announced that they would not be supporting MQA, a proprietary audio format claiming “studio quality sound you can stream or download.” Schiit Audio feels that it is important to support its customers—and potential customers—by clarifying the company’s position on MQA, so that they may choose another DAC provider that backs the format, if they feel it is important to them."

From the Bandcamp Blog:

Bandcamp grew by 35% last year. Fans pay artists $4.3 million dollars every month using the site, and they buy about 25,000 records a day, which works out to about one every 4 seconds (you can see a real-time feed of those purchases on our desktop home page). Nearly 6 million fans have bought music through Bandcamp (half of whom are younger than 30), and hundreds of thousands of artists have sold music on Bandcamp. Digital album sales on Bandcamp grew 14% in 2015 while dropping 3% industry-wide, track sales grew 11% while dropping 13% industry-wide, vinyl was up 40%, cassettes 49%… even CD sales grew 10% (down 11% industry-wide). Most importantly of all, Bandcamp has been profitable (in the now-quaint revenues-exceed-expenses sense) since 2012.