As I mentioned in my earlier entry on introducing Cara to Japan, Linn has been responsible for introducing music streaming into the Japanese audio market and probably because of that I was asked to speak to an invited audience of over 200 press and public at the Ototen show in the Akihabara district of Tokyo recently.
The seminar at Ototen is organised by the publisher Ongen, who owns around ten specialist audio-video titles. They, along with the StereoSound magazine group, dominate the Japanese specialist press. Ongen's audiophile website PhileWeb is the number one online portal and you can see the coverage the event received here.
The event took place as an-onstage dialogue between me and Yamanouchi, a highly-regarded critic, with discussion ranging from the story of Linn DS so far, to the future for downloaded music quality, to the future of the hi-fi industry, to the future for the music industry.
Yamanouchi-san pronounced this a time of great significance for audiophiles and the hifi industry, that will be looked upon in future as a critical turning point. We could not avoid the bare facts: CD players and printed disc media are on an unstoppable and accelerating demise, to be replaced with music streaming and downloading. The emergence of higher-than-CD quality downloads means, for the arguably the first time since the introduction of mass-market digital music, quality is finally on the rise.
And to drill the point home, following my seminar, was a presentation from a Japanese company called Kripton, who were launching a new download portal called HQM (High Quality Music).
For those interested in the details of my demo at Ototen:
We had a Klimax DS / Klimax Kontrol / Klimax Twin / Akurate 242 set up, allowing me to illustrate the differences between mp3 and Studio Master quality for the audience -- the difference sounding surprisingly clear in what was a very large auditorium. I used Claire Martin's "Everything I Got Belongs To You" from her new album A Modern Art that I'm becoming quite a fan of.
I also couldn't resist playing the whole of Alfie Boe "Love Unstuck" from his new album Love Was A Dream. I've never listened to operetta in the past, but I challenge anyone to listen to these traditional love songs from The Merry Widow and others without feeling incredibly uplifted. The quality of the recording, the lightness of the Scottish Opera orchestra, and the emotion in Alfie Boe's voice are all wonderfully joyous.
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