AUDIO NEWS FOR WEEK OF SEPT. 4TH – BY JOHN SUNIER

by | Sep 6, 2017 | Audio News

Audio News Is Back – We hereby return to the Audio News feature, but only once a week instead of two… John Sunier

Use of MQA Has Widened – At the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin it was announced the MQA technology will be enbedded in products from the follwing: LG, Sony Pioneer, Onkyo, iFi, Electrocompaniet, Rotel, dCS, Groovers, Sim Audio, and others. Since the majority of the legacy recordings are analog 2 or 3-track on 7 1/2 or 15 ips tapes, MQA makes little difference on older recordings.

Five Most Expensive Home Theater Installations – Civilized’s web site has a new article on the five most expensive Home Theater installations. One cost $3.5 million and is a Bat Cave format.

New Sony Complete Home Audio System for $1300 – The new Sony MHC-V90W has 10 speakers, a “powerful surround audio system” – it doesn’t say exactly what power – and party and speaker lights to give you a disco feel, gesture control, control from Google’s “Home,” spread-out sound (the tweeters have horns), a Karaoke feature to let you sing along, a Fiesta Mode to create a party sound, even outdoors, a guitar input, a USB port, and Bluetooth wireless technology. IT goes on sale in the Fall. (You can get a small 5.1 home theater audio set up from Orb for $838.)

Alternative to the Compact Disc – We have received several what-appear- to-be-CDs from various small labels. But inside the CD exterior was a thumb hard drive with the music on it. One CD just sent us from Germany said only “HD Audio” on it, so I naturally thought it was a DVD-Audio. I placed it in the tray of my universal Oppo deck but it didn’t play. Turns out it is actually WAV files which can be only played on a computer. Haven’t heard it yet because nobody at Marantz will tell me how to get sound from the USB ports on the front of their 7703 multichannel preamp.

Concentration at Three Major Labels on Multi-CD Sets – RCA will release this month a box set of The Complete Piano Sonatas of Schubert, a box devoted to The Great Luciano Pavarotti and a set of the complete Unreleased Recording Sessions of Glenn Gould in Bach’s Goldberg Variations. They have already released sets of Horowitz, Rachmaninoff and others. Brilliant Records has several multi-disc sets of the complete works of various composers. Warner Brothers Classical also has many multi-CD sets.

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