Audio News - AUDIOPHILE AUDITION

Satellite Radio Has 5 Million Subscribers - From a slow start about 3 1/2 years ago, the two satellite radio services - XM and Sirius - have now signed up over five million subscribers at from $10 to $13 a month - that’s well over $100 a year for a type of product that has been free in this country for over 80 years. One factor aiding its success has been the dismal condition of terrestrial commercial radio - way too many commercials, too narrow song playlists, and a stultifying sameness of programming. The 120 or so separate channels of each service offer a huge variety of specialty programming, and those channels with commercials run a fraction of the number heard on standard radio. More new cars are coming out with one or the other service receivers built in. The threat is causing commercial broadcasters to loosen up their formats and reduce the number of commercials, though with the relaxed FCC regulations multiple station ownership and sameness continues. While the complete freedom from multipath distortion in vehicles is a welcome benefit of the satellite services, their audio quality on music is nowhere near that of CDs. However, it is not that different from MP3 files, and the news, sports and talk channels sound fine.

Pro Mastering Software Includes DSD - Two different firms have announced disc production software for SACD production. The well-known Sonic Studio-DDP premastering application for Mac OSX has added in Version 2 exceptional editing abilities with DSD files, plus WAV, AIFF and other formats. And Steinberg Media Technologies in Germany has announced a new version of its world standard Audio Stream Input.Output (ASIO) architecture to support the DSD standard. It allows transporting DSD audio between audio applications and hardware supporting the standard, thus opening up possibilities for hardware and audio application manufacturers to include DSD in their products.

Yamaha Introduces 7.1 Receiver with HD Radio & HDMI - Yamaha Electronics; new RX-V4600 AV digital home theater receiver is the first to include not only the usual FM and AM reception but also the new HD terrestrial digital radio technology from iBiquity which will eventually replace analog broadcasting as DTV will replace analog telecasting. 275 stations are already broadcasting HR Radio. The 130-watt-per-channel receiver also features the latest HDMI digital interface connection which includes both video and audio, and provides Dual i.Link terminals for digital connection to universal SACD/DVD-A disc players using that interface, including Yamaha and Denon.