B&W To Furnish Their Speaker Line to Best Buy – Top British speaker/maker Bowers & Wilkins will be offering their entire high-end speaker line via the Magnolia Design Centers in stores of the Best Buy chain, beginning in October. They will also be available at the six Magnolia AV stores nationally. B&W’s chairman frankly explained the major changes in the high-end business, pointing out that their audio dealerships have declined greatly. He put the reasons to both more emphasis on video decreasing the space for audio, the switch to data-reduced audio, and the many “lifestyle” products for distributed and mobile audio taking up space in stores. He said the failures of traditional retailers have been dramatic in the U.S., but less so overseas. The Magnolia outlets also carry such high-end lines as Denon, Marantz, McIntosh, Pioneer Elite, Arcam, MartinLogan, Monitor Audio, Sonus Faber, Definitive Technology and Pro-Ject turntables.
Wireless Specialist CSR Acquires APT-X Audio Compression Technology – Cambridge, UK-based CSR, which has had a successful three-year collaboration with Belfast-based APT Licensing Ltd., has now acquired that specialist in professional-quality audio compression. This will enable CST to strengthen its offering in the growing real-time streaming audio market for mobile and wireless consumer applications, and support expanding into broader audio markets. The apt-x suite of audio compression algorithms is renowned for non-destructive, transparent audio compression solutions which retain the full integrity of the original digital audio. The apt-x algorithm sets the base-rate quality much higher than many audio codecs, to offer a consistently excellent experience. It is particularly well-suited to Bluetooth wireless headphones. apt-x Standard is the grandfather of broadcast and distribution codecs, with two decade of successful implementation in the field.
Cloud Music Streams Your Own Music Files to iPhone or iPod Touch – A new $2 app for smartphones called Cloud Music goes beyond other apps allowing you to play back music wirelessly from your home computer by streaming right from a free Google Docs account. You can upload files of any type to your Google Docs account, and Cloud Music can stream WAV, MP3 or MP4 audio files. If you put the track files in a folder with a cover image, you will even see that while listening. All you have to do is upload the files from your computer. iOS 3.1.3 or later is required on your iPhone or iPod Touch.
Marantz Network Audio Player – All-in-one music source components are beginning to replace two-channel preamps and receivers. Marantz America has announced their NA7004 Audio Player at $799, which not only has the usual CD player but a hi-res D-to-A converter for those with large collections of downloaded hi-res music on their computers that they want to hear thru their home audio system. It delivers pristine audio quality from the most widely-used digital music sources, including FLAC, WAV, WMA, WMA Lossless, MP3, MPEG-4 and AAC (but not AIFF). The USB sample rate is 96K/24-bit and the converter has Coax, Optical and USB digital inputs. The font-panel USB input features iPod Digital Connection and there is a back-panel port for wireless Bluetooth streaming. It also receives over 14,000 Net radio stations.
