Marantz's KI Pearl gear gets coffeetable book, SACD

Last month, Marantz announced its upcoming KI Pearl line of high-end audio equipment. The SA-KI Pearl SACD Player and PM-KI Pearl Integrated Amplifier were created to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the company's European brand director, audio designer Ken Ishiwata. Both the SACD player and the amp have all the hallmarks of special, limited-edition product releases: limited quantities, a unique "silk pearl" finish, and a formidable price tag ($2,999 for the SA-KI and $3,599 for the PM-KI). Now, Marantz has announced a series of collectibles to go with these limited-edition components.

The company will release a hardcover coffee table book ($30) and a dual-layer SACD ($50) that, like the KI Pearl components themselves, focus on the work of Ishiwata. The SACD is the most notable item, with a dozen jazz tracks chosen by Ishiwata and featuring the work of singer Katelijne van Otterloo. It was recorded with entirely acoustic instruments with a small sound stage, to emphasize Ishiwata's aural aesthetics.

Both the book and SACD will be available from Marantz retailers later this summer. The SA-KI Pearl SACD player is already available at Marantz retailers, and the PM-KI Pearl will ship in September.

— Will Greenwald

CEDIA: McIntosh's SACD/CD Player

What? You thought SACD was dead? How wrong you would be. At least at the CEDIA Expo, SACD was making a strong comeback showing. Maybe higher-end installer types are presenting more demand than lowly big-box store customers. In any case, the high-end audio format is certainly alive and well on the Expo floor in Denver.

Case in point, the McIntosh MCD500 SACD/CD player is their flagship model, joining the MCD201 and MCD301 players. It features two selectable digital inputs, coaxial and optical digital inputs, fixed and variable balanced outputs (up to 6 volts), dedicated headphone amplifier with level control, and die-cast disc tray.

Also inside, you'll find four 24-bit/192-kHz D/A converters per channel arranged in a differential balanced configuration. Of course, all clocks are phase-locked looped. Data is read from the disc at twice the normal rate. The glass front panel is illuminated by a combination of custom-designed fiber optic light diffusors and LEDs. An illuminated remote control is included

Price? Take a guess....

It's Alive! It's Alive!

Remember SACD? You know, Super Audio Compact Disc?  You know, Sony's contender against DVD-Audio? Both provided better sound quality and more channels than CD, and were supposed to replace CD? And remember how both failed in the U.S. market?

Well, Apparently SACD still has enough loyal followers, at least in Japan, to encourage Sony to announce a new SACD player. A high-end SACD player, at that.

Code for XO∆E: DVD-A? SACD?

An interesting press release crossed my desk (read: popped into my e-mail Inbox) on Friday:

"John Mellencamp's Life, Death, Love, and Freedom, from Hear Music, July 15."

Buried down in the fourth paragraph is this:

"The album will be the first-ever release in the XO∆E (CODE) format. T Bone Burnett [who produced Mellencamp's new album] and his team of engineers developed CODE, a proprietary technology that creates high-definition audio files that are virtually indistinguishable from the original master tapes. The resonance, warmth, and presence that has been realized with CODE is unprecedented in the digital era."

"Unprecedented"? Doesn't that sound, um, familiar? Read on . . .

"No Taste for High-Quality Audio"?

Been meaning to post this link for some time now . . .

Fans of DVD-Audio, SACD, surround sound, and so forth are hereby encouraged to check out No Taste for High-Quality Audio, published recently in the British newspaper The Guardian. It's a pretty neat summation by Jack Schofield, who begins: "Today, we live in a world where poor-quality audio is becoming the norm." Required reading, and reflection.

Note that Schofield calls DVD-Audio "extinct."

That got me thinking: Is he right?

Genesis Update: Hey, They're Late!

As a postscript to my Genesis scoop below: Rhino has just announced that Genesis: 1983-1998, the second boxed set of the band's complete studio recordings in surround sound, has been bumped from October 23 to sometime in November. Meanwhile, an expanded, two-CD "tour edition" of Turn It On Again: The Hits will be released on September 11, to coincide with . . . the tour! The North American leg begins in Toronto on September 7. For complete dates (tickets still available!), click here. —Ken Richardson

Happy 25th Birthday, CD! Now, Get Lost!

Or so the masses seem to be saying.

The Compact Disc is indeed 25 years old today. On August 17, 1982, the first discs were born in Germany. They contained Richard Strauss's Alpine Symphony, but the first commercially available release would be Billy Joel's 52nd Street. CDs and CD players initially went on sale in Europe and Japan; it wouldn't be until 1983 that the format reached America.

Back then, Pieter Kramer was the head of the optical research group at Philips (which co-invented the format with Sony). That's him in the right-hand photo, which was taken on Monday. He's holding a model of the first CD player.

S&V has already tracked the history of the CD and what lies ahead — see The Future of Recorded Music — so I won't bother rehashing anything here. What I will say is that, personally, I was happy to welcome the CD a quarter-century ago — and happy to say goodbye to the LP and its surface noise, user-unfriendliness, and frequent coloration that was often mistaken for "warmth."

Are we now, in turn, saying goodbye to the CD? Well, from 2001 to 2006, CD sales fell from their historical peak of 712 million to 553 million. That's a drop of 22%. Record companies are scrambling, lousy digital files are proliferating, and the perceived "value" of music is withering away. As Kramer told AP writer Toby Sterling on Monday: "The MP3 and all the little things that the boys and girls have in their pockets can replace the CD, absolutely."

But it has been a good ride for the format. I've enjoyed it immensely — although, truth be told, I've been enjoying my journeys with SACD and DVD-A even more. Whither those formats?

"You never know how long a standard will last," Kramer said. "But the CD was a solid, good standard — and still is." —Ken Richardson

Phil Rizzuto: Heaven Couldn't Wait

Here's a tip of the Yankee cap — or whatever hat you're wearing, baseball fan — to Phil Rizzuto, the Bronx Bombers' shortstopping/broadcasting Scooter, who died Monday night at the age of 89.

If you're looking for the sports story here . . . well, by all means, go to the obit in, natch, The New York Times. But I'd like to recall the music story, too: Phil's classic appearance in "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" on Meat Loaf's 1977 album, Bat Out of Hell.

The Gray Lady Is Behind the Times

Extra! "The multichannel sound available for homes has arrived for the car." So says a teaser on the front page of the Automobiles section in this Sunday's edition of The New York Times.

This must be news indeed to engineer Elliot Scheiner, for example, whose DVD-Audio-equipped ELS Surround system for Acura has been available for three years. Meanwhile, nowhere in the Times article — "Summer Tunes That Come from Every Direction" by John R. Quain — does it even mention that DVD-Audio discs have always been playable in surround on car DVD-Video units.

It does mention, however — and get ready for this — that "some formats adhere to a so-called 5.1-channel format (the point one referring to a center, or low-frequency, channel often handled by a subwoofer)." As of now, that howler hasn't been corrected on the newspaper's Web site.

Sad to say, I guess we should expect these kinds of things from a paper that still calls its car section (repeat after me, in your best Tony Curtis-in-The Great Race voice): Au-to-mo-biles.

To its credit, the article includes aftermarket options like Sony's SACD-equipped MEX-DV2000 (see post immediately below) and Pioneer's DVD-A-equipped AVH-P7800DVD entertainment system. It also mentions pre-installed systems in cars by Mercedes-Benz, Cadillac, and yes, Acura, as well as the only car unit that will play both DVD-A and SACD: the Bose Media System (shown above) in the Ferrari 612 Scaglietti.

But really, these times demand the Times these surround times demand Sound & Vision! —Ken Richardson

SACD in the Car: It's Too Late, Sony?

That's right, if you've been waiting to play that multichannel Tapestry in the car, now you can finally do it. A full six years after the dawn of surround SACDs, Sony has introduced the first car SACD player, the MEX-DV2000 (above, $280). I initially heard rumblings about this way back in January, but now, apparently, it's a reality.

And on Sunday (why Sunday?), Sony announced that another SACD-equipped car unit is coming in August: the XAV-W1 audio/video system (left, $800), complete with touchscreen panel.

For more info on both models, click here.

Despite so many industry people insisting how music in surround is destined to "take off" in the car, it sure is interesting that it took Sony this long to mobile-ize SACD.