February 2014

Senseless Ramblings
CES / T.H.E. Show 2014, Grammy Awards And The Future
Plus more $250,000+ products and the virtual landscape.
Article By Steven R. Rochlin

  First I'd like to say congratulations to all my fiends and associates who earned a Grammy Award last week during the 2014 event. It was truly great to see an incredibly popular event have multiple live online video feeds before the live mainstream CBS broadcast. The standard live TV broadcast featured many legendary and leading musical artists. Only a handful of years ago all we could do was watch the live show on broadcast TV. This year's event took advantage of modern technology and thus you could immerse yourself in the many ways to 'take part' in the festivities right from the comfort of your livingroom couch. Between all the live Internet video streams of the Grammy Awards broadcast, plus major network support in high resolution Dolby Digital and Twitter strategy, you can easily see how major music events are reaching their enthusiastic audience. Thus it brings me joy to share with you that Enjoy the Music.com's sister site Enjoy the Music.TV will be exclusively providing our live Internet TV broadcast, plus live interactive chat so you can take part and ask questions, during a variety of high fidelity audio events in 2014! It is time to bring our industry some of that love the majors have jumped upon with great effort and expense.

Getting back to the future, thank you for all the e-mails due to last months Senseless Rambling. In hindsight I should have made a better distinction between high fidelity audio, the music industry and other industries. Add to that, as a successful and proven investor there are things said that are geared towards various communities not necessarily audio related. This is, to some extent, what Senseless Ramblings is all about. It is not just about high fidelity audio so please accept my apologies of you felt last moths editorial was 100% about the high fidelity audio industry. Am humbly grateful for music lovers and audiophiles worldwide who regularly read Enjoy the Music.com, yet have been noticing our ever-expanding readership also reaches those who simply want 'the best' and thus send us e-mails to help guide them through the proverbial equipment and online music service maze.

Yes indeed Beats just launched their music service earlier this month and their 320kbs streams sound quite good... for 320 kbs. Of course great equipment manufacturers such as Sonos (reviewed back in 2009 here) already configured their hardware/software to handle Beats Music as an option and it is very easy to include the service to your Sonos system or via an app on your mobile device. Hopefully audiophiles will soon have HDtracks, Acoustic Sounds' DSD, Linn and others also offering apps and streaming music at higher resolution. Since high-end audio generally equates to higher costs, would you pay $20/mo for an online high quality music streaming service that also includes one high rez album downloads per month too?

Did anyone at CES who attended the Sony DSD and high resolution audio digital download push at Bouchon Bistro bother to ask how many millions of dollars Sony and others plans to invest in advertising their high resolution audio initiative? Are many people in the industry so blind as to be easily pleased that a few good words and a free meal is just enough to make you placated? Words without real action is just wasted time and i, for one, have no time to waste for typical market jabber-jawing. We smart investors hear this rhetoric all the time in the financial markets, and thus know it is all talk and no action in hopes of somehow spurring the market without any real action or investment. Talk is cheap! So Sony and others, when can we expect to see TV commercials promoting DSD, 24-bit/96kHz, etc? Dare we ask if you will be educating consumers by comparing DSD / 24-bit/96kHz to lower resolution CD and lackluster lossy mp3 files that Sony and others have been selling for decades? It brings me joy to know that our industry now embraces the many ways to reach music lovers worldwide and let us hope we get some of the big players to truly bring a change out of mp3 and in to 24-bit audio high rez. As CES and T.H.E. Show are now in our proverbial rearview mirror, there were many great announcements. You can see our CES / T.H.E. Show Las Vegas 2014 report at this link.

Of course it seems prices have indeed been going up as Naim was showcasing their cool quarter-million amplifier. The again many may remember the million dollar one at the High End Show in Munich, Germany. i predict we will be seeing many more such 'statement pieces' as those at the top of the financial chain seem to be looking to diversify. Let us hope they include a fine high fidgety audio system to help augment their fine art, mechanical timepiece and exotic/rare automobile collection. Of course there are some amazing great audio pieces out there for under $2000 too; with some astonishing great bargains for well under $1000.

We do indeed live in interesting times and everyone here at Enjoy the Music.com and Enjoy the Music.TV know that our longstanding and loyal audience realizes we have always been the first to offer many such Internet technology advances. We are humbly grateful for you, the industry's finest forward-thinking readership, who are seeking to enjoy all the great advances in tech and take full advantage of a variety ways to expand our experiences and knowledge. You reading this article is proof we are all demanding more from the high fidelity audio industry. We want to be educated and take part in the process too! As always, in the end what really matters is that you...

Enjoy the Music,