Audio News for May 10, 2013

by | May 10, 2013 | Audio News

Worries About the Coming of Google Glass – Resistance is already afoot against Google’s new wearable technology computer glasses, which will not go on sale to the public for some months. It has brought up questions that it might distract drivers, wreck relationships and cause people to lose what little privacy they still have in public. It is a pair of lens-less frames with a tine computer on the right earpiece. About 10,000 of them have already been distributed to developers and “explorers.”  Supposedly you most speak or touch the glasses to activate them, and look directly at a person prior to taking a photo or video of them, but a developer has already created an app which takes a photo when the wearer only winks.  A bar in Seattle has already forbidden them.   A social media expert observed, “Google Glass will test the right to privacy vs. the First Amendment.” [NY Times]

World’s Highest-Resolution Master Recording for New Linn Release – Cleveland-based Five/Four Productions (featuring tech experts from Telarc’s former audiophile slant) has captured the Boston Baroque directed by Martin Pearlman in Haydn’s Nelson Mass and Symphony No. 102 using 11.2 MHz direct stream digital technology. Five/Four Productions sees this as a quantum leap in hi-res recording technology. It takes the one-bit DSD technology used for mastering the best SACDs from 2.8 MHz to 11.1 MHz, resulting in a recording 256 times the resolution of a standard CD. Five/Four Productions has won 16 GRAMMY Awards plus Japan’s Grand Prix Award. The SACD and download is tentatively planned for release in October.

Red Introduces Pro 4K Cinema Player – Known for its reasonably priced (by pro film cinema standards) 4K digital cinema cameras used for many feature films today, Red now has their Redray 4K cinema player at $1450, which plays 4K files stored on its 1TB HDD and encoded using their proprietary lossy codec at -255:1 data compression. Nevertheless Red claims the resultant image appears lossless. It can also upscale HD content to the digital-cinema standard (rather than to the reduced home UHD-TV standard). A two-hour 4K movie occupies about 18GB on the internal drive. Red had partnered with Odemax for network distribution of UHD content to the Redray, which can thus be used in commercial UHD theaters, though with Odemax handling all the billing.

For the Rich and Committed Hi-End Home Theater Movie Fan – Prima Cinema Service makes available rented UHD TV movies in the home, at $500 per movie, only while the features are being shown on the theatrical circuit. Once the user begins viewing, they have only 24 hours to finish before the file goes away. There are currently no functions of fast forward, rewind etc. Prima’s H.264-compressed file is delivered as an Internet download modified version of the Digital Cinema Package delivered to the movie theaters for digital cinema presentations. The player is $35,000 and it requires a preset static IP address not used anywhere else. It delivers twice as much color detail as HD TV, plus 5.1 or 7.1 lossless soundtracks in either Dolby TrueHD or PCM. The player’s only AV outputs are HDMI, and of course it requires a very high-speed Internet connection. The player can store up to 50 movies on its 2TB “movie vault” and is protected from hacking and stolen files by several methods—including a finger-swipe biometric reader which sports a “liveness” detector to prevent using an “excised finger” for access! Just like in the movies, eh?

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