Fred Manteghian Blog

According to an AFP article at Breitbart.com, <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=070322121539.enwwmbqh&show_artic... target="new">Nielson Tracking</a> reports CD sales for (almost) the first three months of 2007 are down 20% over the same period last year. Only 89 million retail CDs were sold year to date, compared with 112 million sold during the same period in 2006. Downloads of albums were off too, dropping from 119 million to 99 million this year.

One of the biggest ripoffs in the world is from a company that professes to be in business of preventing the commitment thereof. Yeah, I'm talking about the folks at Consumer Reports. For them, it's business as usual and their modus operandi hasn't changed in years. I remember shopping for a car years before the Internet had anything worthwhile on it, and going to the newsstand and picking up a copy of "Edmund's guide to New Cars" for seven bucks. There, in plain English, was a guide that gave me the MSRP, the dealer invoice, the "holdback," the list of options and anything else I might need to drive the best deal I could when I entered the showroom.

My sister gave me a Border's gift certificate for Christmas, and rather than do the conventional thing and buy some books that I would then be obligated to read, I bought some CDs instead. Among them are a remaster of Genesis's 1973 epic, "Selling England by the Pound" and Pink Floyd's last, and sorely unappreciated, "Division Bell." Now, I have both these on vinyl already, and although I'm in the process of thinking about the possibility of getting restarted on the vinyl-to-digital project, I felt it safer and most expedient to just buy the damn things and get them into my iPod post haste.

The consumer electronics industry has done a pretty lousy job of educating everyone on new audio and video technology. And by "industry," I mean manufacturers, their marketing arms, and even journalists, though none at UltimateAV. Start with your newspapers of record. Michael Fremer has palpitations reading the New York Times audio / video coverage (I get the same effect from their Op-ed page!).

That's right. It's my birthday. Fifty years ago, I arrived. But unlike this Magnavox console which followed me into the world a few years later, I've not been abandoned curbside. At least, not yet.

It only takes five seconds with the earpieces Apple gives you with their iPod to make you wonder how the portable music market ever took off in the first place. Another five seconds watching my wife's cousin listening to a Bob Dylan MP3 over the <i>built-in speaker</i> in his Chocolate cellular phone was all it took to remind me that for most people, sound can't possibly matter.

Here's a BluRay drive you can stick in your computer. At $Yen 99,800, less the 10% the store was offering you if you opened up a charge account (I'd be lost reading my monthly statement!), you can have it for about $750. It burns single and dual layer Blues at a 2X rate that'll have you saying, "Wow – this sure is slow!"