SPEAKER: Welcome to day 3 of the 2008 NAMM Show. We’re going to get things kicked off here this morning in the press room. We got a very, very exciting group of people here today. They’ve got some news that they want to tell you about, and it’s my pleasure to introduce Ed Cherney from the METalliance to come on up here and talk to you about their news today. Ed Cherney everybody.

[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]

ED CHERNEY: I got elected to start this off and I’m going to try to be brief and concise. All of us, every one of us has spent our adult lives in the quest of the holy grail, and that’s audio. We’ve spent our time working for the artist and for the music, always for the artist and the music and have never, ever, ever, ever compromised on finding great sound. We’ve spent nights all night long for years and years and years trying to get the very best. Individually we’ve tried to do that, and individually we’ve tried to wade through the [EXPLETIVE] of what’s good and what’s not, and we decided to come together at some point and stand up and try to tell people and educate what great audio is about and the tools that are available for you to do that, and I’m really honored to be part of it. I think they brought me only me in because I was the youngest and I was best gambler when we -- But I’m really proud and happy to be with our pro partners who we’re going to introduce later and my partners that are here that have never compromised with great audio, and we all, dare I say, we stand up. We know what we’re talking about through experience, through trial and error, and if you can’t believe us, I don't know who you can believe. So, on with the show.

Frank Filipetti. Our partner and good friend Frank Filipetti who’s really going to tell you what it’s about.

FRANK FILIPETTI: All right. You’re probably, you know, wondering why we’re doing this. Apart from what Ed just said, the real question is we’re living in an era now where the young people of today are listening to music formats that are reduced in resolution from the formats of just 10 or 15 years ago. We are living in a world where we’re constantly being bombarded with high-definition video, new forms of digital film making, all kinds of high-resolution formats and yet in the music industry, we’re the only entertainment industry that’s going backwards. We’re moving from high-resolution audio of the DVD audio specification which came out about 10 years ago, we’ve now moved from high-res 96 k and 192 audio 24-bit down to MP3 and all kinds of lossy techniques which the kids are using to listen to. We’ve ended up sacrificing quality for convenience.

We’ve always had a convenient format. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, we had the cassette, which was a low-resolution format, but at the same time the people who bought the cassettes and who listened to the Walkmans and so forth while they were jogging and doing their daily chores also were aware of the fact that there was a high-resolution format as well that they could go home and listen to under vinyl disc on a really high end system. They were able to experience music for music’s sake, not as an adjunct to something else, as an adjunct to vide or as an adjunct to driving in a car or as an adjunct to even showering in the morning. It was music for its own sake.

That art of listening, the art of listening to music is starting to go. People are putting thousands of songs on an iPod, to have their whole collection on an iPod, which is a wonderful thing, and we’re not suggesting for one minute that you don’t listen to your iPod, and we’re not suggesting that that’s a bad format and that we’re not making judgments about that. What we are saying is there’s another story here that a lot of our kids, especially are going to be the young consumers for the next 30 years, and even young adults are not aware of, and we put this group together.

We reached out initially to contact the manufacturers and producers of content and hardware who we all use in the studio. These are people who we felt that have always represented the highest of the high in high-end audio. They represent not only high-end audio for the consumer but high-end audio for the professional. And we started out by contacting those people who we thought were very representative of what we’re looking for in the industry.

We now have this group of people that we’re very proud to stand alongside and behind, and we just wanted you to know that this mission of ours is more than just a group of people getting together to make a statement. This is a passion for all of us, and we want you all to realize that it is now our undying passion to bring this concept of high-resolution audio out to the masses and give the kids of today and the younger people of today a choice.

[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]