Audio News for April 26, 2008

New Disklavier Does It All – The new Mark IV version 3.0 of Yamaha’s digital reproducing piano – due out this summer – has added so many features that it is a high-end digital media receiver that happens to come in the shape of a grand piano. The new unit blurs the lines between home theater, live performance and home automation as never before. Besides producing a truly live piano performance  – something you don’t get from any other digital gadget – the new Disklavier can browse a whole universe of content on the Internet, play your favorite selections from any room in your home, and even show images on a connected video display in conjunction with the music. It incorporates Wi-Fi capabilities, and a unique video sync capability letting users videotape their own performances with a typical camcorder and the play them back with the piano in perfect step with the image. When the Disklavier streams songs from the Internet, the keys and pedals move up and down together with the music and even vocals come out of the piano’s built-in speakers.  This is light years beyond granddad’s player piano.

Pristine Classical Offers 96K Downloads of Enhanced Historical Recordings – The UK’s Pristine Classical site now offers many downloads of their hi-fi reissues using lossless 16-bit or 24-bit  FLAC encoding for replay on most any DVD player. An inexpensive application (for Windows only) called Audio DVD Creator creates a video disc with 96K audio only, from the 44.1K FLAC files found on the Pristine web site. You don’t need a DVD-Audio or universal disc player, only to be certain your DVD player isn’t so old that it automatically downsamples 96K source material. Another advantage in addition to the higher resolution is the additional capacity of a recordable DVD, meaning you get much more music onto a single disc that is possible with CDs. Details are at: www.pristineclassical.com

Blaupunkt Car Head End Unit Is CD-Free – The Blaupunkt Brisbane replacement car radio has no CD player slot, but supplies instead a SD/MMC card slot to let users transfer hundreds or thousands of songs fro their computer and listen to them in place of CDs which may jump or become damaged in the car environment.  It is only single-DIN dimension and ha a USB connector as well as audio input for cell phones or external navigation devices. Optional modules for Bluetooth and iPod are also available. The front panel display uses 4096 colors. (I had a struggle locating a combo CD/cassette head end a year ago; now even CD-only units seem on the way out.)

Klipsch and B&W Joint Effort – A surprising collaboration has been announced between classy British high-end and professional speaker maker B&W and longtime American consumer audio horn speaker specialist Klipsch. They have worked together to design and produce a high-end floor-standing tower speaker called the Klipsch Palladium P-39F. It stands almost five feet tall and comes in a horizontal zebra-grain veneer with a striking curved enclosure with several ports on the side. The $15,000 a pair speakers feature Klipsch’s trademark metallic horn tweeters, which sit at the very top of the enclosure above several low-frequency drivers standing over a floating brushed aluminum base with spikes. Actually, by today’s sky-high high-end speaker prices, the Palladiums sound almost like a bargain. (One manufacturer recently told me most of their business is now in their $75,000 and $150,000 speaker systems.)