Gramophone’s Favorite Things

It’s Summer. Time to Take Music Outdoors

Love the idea of music on the deck, patio or poolside but loathe the idea of bulky black speakers dampening your view? We’ve been working with a speaker vendor called Madison Fielding that has the solution:  high quality outdoor speakers cleverly hidden in a variety of usable planters and functional wooden benches. The PlanterSpeakers line integrates into a variety of outdoor settings and can be filled with live or artificial plants. All models are constructed of top-quality, weatherproof materials.

B&W Loudspeakers Enters the Social Music Scene with the Society of Sound

B&W’s new Society of Sound Music Club is a welcome response to the overly stylized and overly commercial air play of mainstream recording today. The Music Club is a chance to rediscover what made people  fall in love with music to begin with: original artists, immaculate recordings and moving songwriting. Hallelujah.

The Music Club is a partnership between B&W and Peter Gabriel’s state-of-the-art Real World recording studios. The goal of the project is to produce and record specially commissioned albums from exceptional artists all over the world – many well known and many as yet undiscovered.

You can become a member of the Music Club, which grants you access to monthly downloads. Each recording is presented as an Apple Lossless file, which is a larger format than typical MP3 files. Apple Lossless files are identical to the original recording created in studio so you hear the recording in super high fidelity.

Fortune Mag Calls Runco Television a $9,000 Bargain

In the warehouse club world where a so-so flat TV can be had for $500 or less, there’s luckily  still a few manufacturers out there more focused on quality and performance than simply building a bigger screen with the cheapest possible parts. Runco is one of them. We’ve been selling Runco TVs for years and there’s no denying they come packed with superior technology, brilliant screens and unbelievable processing power. They also come with hefty price tags, but for a TV connoisseur, it’s all about value. With Runco, you get a great value for your investment. That’s why I was delighted to see an article in Fortune Small Business reviewing the 50” XP-50DHD and declaring the set a $9,000 bargain. You can read the full article here.

Hitachi 1.5 Arrives

I saw a preview of the new Hitachi 1.5 LCD television line at the 2008 CES show in  Las Vegas earlier this year, and now they’ve started arriving in-store. Each model boasts an ultra thin cabinet that’s just 1.5 inches deep. Ultra-thin models are available in four screen sizes of 32, 37, 42 and 47 inches. Hitachi’s designers left no inch of the TVs untouched: inspired by areas as diverse as automotive design, each set boasts clean lines and distinctive aesthetics even on the back of the set.