Month: May 2020

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Elac Carina BS243.4 loudspeaker

May 28, 2020 | News | No Comments

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No one thinks I have a good memory, but I can easily remember a few sentences from my March 2016 review of Elac’s Debut B6 loudspeaker. The sentence I remember best: “I might be able to forgive you for liking Paul more than John, George, or Ringo, but if you don’t grasp the genius of Mel Tormé, only God can save you.” I felt guilty for bringing God into the story, but I sincerely wanted everyone to experience the wonder of the Velvet Fog (Tormé) and to realize how good Mel could sound on a pair of $279.99/pair upstart speakers with audiophile pretensions.


And I can’t forget this one: “Impulsively, I jumped up and put my hands on their cabinets. . . . They were vibrating like sex toys!” I was not exaggerating.


When Elac’s new $1200/pair Carina BS243.4 loudspeakers arrived, I noticed how completely different they looked from the Debut B6s. No vibrating, cheap-vinyl-covered booxes here. The BS243.4s looked sleek, solid, curvy, and moderne, with chamfered front-side corners and a trapezoidal footprint.


The BS243.4’s expensive-looking matte-black finish looked like steel. Curious, I tapped the cabinet sides and top with a small flashlight. It sounded like MDF, but each side surface sounded different. I used the flashlight to peer inside and measure the plastic bottom- firing port (6″ × 1.75″). This bottom port is able to work because the front of the BS243.4’s cabinet is attached to a strong hard-plastic base, making it look like a normal rectangular speaker from the front. However, in the side elevation, the cabinet rises upward front to back about 1.68″—leaving space for the wind from the port to exit gracefully from three sides. I wondered if the cabinet had been designed specifically for desktop positioning, and if my 24″ Sound Anchors Reference stands, which are partially open at the top, would properly load the port. Then I remembered . . .


At audio shows, when I enter the Elac room, I always feel this sort of bouncy energy that makes me smile and perks me up. Then, of course, I see Andrew Jones’s electric grin jutting above the swarming heads. Then, of course, I see the newest Elac speakers. (There are always new Elac speakers.) On one such occasion, I waited for Andrew to finish his spiel and the crowd to disperse, then found a seat next to America’s most popular speaker designer. He laughed as I sat down: “Vibrated like sex toys, huh?”


Moments later, while listening to a song with copious bass, I noticed the curtains behind the left speaker blowing wildly in the wind from the speaker’s rear port. I smiled and tapped Andrew on the shoulder and pointed. We both laughed.


Description
Elac Americas’ Carina series consists of three models: the BS243.4 bookshelf speaker, the FS247.4 floorstander, and the CC241.4 center-channel speaker.


“We are on a nautical theme at Elac, since the Germany office is in Kiel, Germany, an important sailing town,” Andrew told me. “Kiel is German for keel, the stabilizer for a boat. So, Carina comes from the Latin for the keel of a ship.”


For the Carina series, Jones combines an updated (made in China) version of Elac Germany’s famous JET tweeter with a 5.25″ aluminum-cone midbass driver with a com- pound curvature that extends frequency response and allows for the BS243.4’s relatively high (2.7kHz) crossover point.


JET tweeter
My personal experience suggests that the overall sound of any loudspeaker is greatly determined by the designer’s choice of tweeter. For that reason, most speaker manufacturers build their entire line around a particular type of tweeter. Lately, Dr. Oskar Heil’s air motion transformer (AMT) has been the tweeter of choice in several prominent manufacturers’ lineups. GoldenEar calls their version of the AMT a High-Velocity Folded Ribbon (HVFR). Adam Audio calls heirs a Unique Accelerated Ribbon Tweeter (U-ART). MartinLogan calls theirs a Folded Motion (FM) tweeter. And Elac calls their version a Jet Emission Tweeter (JET).


No matter what highfalutin name they give it, the AMT is a simple dipole transducer that squeezes air from the curtain-like folds of a sheet of polyimide film suspended in a strong magnetic field. You can’t usually see it, but these membranes have a thin, continuous conductor deposited on their surface.


My friend, audio-design wizard Jeffrey Jackson of EMIA, believes Heil was a god and described to me how the AMT works: “The voice wire goes up and down and back up again . . . it is the direction of current flow being in opposition to its neighbor (like Coltrane’s “One Down, One Up”) that makes it squeeze or push.”


We call them “air motion transformers” because they move air at a velocity several times higher than that of the diaphragm moving it. As a result, the AMT tweeter’s sensitivity and transient response are improved.


The sonic effect of all this high-speed, high-volume air movement is, to my ears, one of quiet, fatigue-free detail and apparently low distortion.


Setup
Unlike dome tweeters, folded ribbons allow designers to control both horizontal and vertical dispersion. Therefore, AMTs usually provide wider horizontal dispersion than domes. Andrew Jones told me in an email, “The Carina BS243.4 has virtually no change in response at 15-degrees horizontally right out to nearly 15kHz and still not much change at 30 degrees. Therefore, you cannot easily change the speaker’s tonality by how much you toe it in.


“Facing straight forward will give a broad but not super-focused image; a little toe-in will give you a little more focus. What really matters is how close your side walls are. Toe them in further if you are too close to your side walls.”


When I asked about how far they should be placed from the wall behind them, he replied, “Twelve inches from the [front] wall is about right in general, but this can be very room dependent. As usual, move them around until they sound good to you.”


The BS243.4 is biwireable via rugged-looking binding posts but does not include grilles.


Back in the fog
The first record I listened to critically through the Elacs was by that most artful of singers, Mel Tormé: Live at the Crescendo (LP, Affinity AFFD 100). I wanted to see how the BS243.4 compared to my memory of the Elac B6.


The first songs I played were “Autumn Leaves” and “It’s Alright With Me,” and the first sonic thing I noticed was a distinct lack of saturated Mel-tone. Standup bass was finger- snappy and flesh-on-strings detailed. Assorted room sounds and applause were well-described. Rhythm-keeping was better than first-rate. But overall, the sound was slightly dry, and some measure of Mel-harmonics were missing.

Listening #196

May 27, 2020 | News | No Comments

The world’s a place of horrors
Because each man thinks he’s right
—Loudon Wainwright III


As a teen, I loved spending time in musical-instrument shops. Now, with exceptions, the experience is reliably depressing.


Last Saturday was exemplary: I walked into my local supermarket of sound to buy a set of guitar strings, and was at once assaulted by the racket of two gunslingers trying to outshoot each other. Combatant No.1, a fiftysomething male with an elaborate dye job, had hold of a new Martin dreadnought acoustic guitar, on which he aggressively demonstrated his repertoire of Stephen Stills licks. Combatant No.2, a younger and more reserved-looking male, also armed with a new Martin, alternated between playing along with No.1 and trying to drown him out, the latter no easy task. It was impossible to tell if either player was any good, because both were wielding music not as art but as truncheon.


It occurs to me that many audio enthusiasts do the same.


Man the Lifeboats
Between 2004 and 2010, my family and I made three trips to Florida, primarily to visit Walt Disney World. During our stays there, which I enjoyed, I spent idle moments watching the anoles (footnote 1) that lived in the palmetto trees outside our lodgings.1 The adult males, typically a brighter green than the females, would challenge one another by inflating their dewlaps—pouches of strawberry-red skin that extend from their throats—and performing a stationary dance that made the animals look as if they were doing push-ups. The one with the smaller or less-red dewlap, defeated, would slink away, presumably toward permanent bachelorhood. There are worse things, I suppose.


In more recent years, I’ve been unable to look at male customers in music stores without imagining them as anoles with denim and hair. Sadly, a disproportionate number of male audiophiles seem destined for the same transformation—sadly because, unlike their guitar-wielding cousins, the far greater damage done by those audiophiles is to themselves. They conceive, assemble, and adjust their systems not to find the colorful truths hidden away in their records but to do battle with other men. They do this on a playing field defined by two axes:


1) My soundstage


2) My bass


The man whose soundstage is more impressive—typically defined in terms of its detail, the wholeness of the images therein, and, most of all, its depth—is the winner. Similarly, extending and enlarging one’s bass range is literally indistinguishable from doing the same to one’s dewlap. Redness may also play a role.


The real loser in these scenarios, daily played out in the virtual listening room of the Internet and at numberless audio shows, audio stores, and audio-society gatherings, is music itself. Otherwise, the players do little harm—again, except to themselves.


Less harmless are those audio enthusiasts who are least secure: those whose toxic rage at a world that does not accept the authority of their opinions—a world that persists in enjoying recorded music in ways of which they do not approve—accomplishes nothing other than making our hobby seem repellant. Their playing field also has two axes:


1) My dick


2) My dick


In a recent thread that showed up on my Facebook feed, I saw a number of posts from an evidently well-known audio maven who stated, without apparent irony, that it is his “duty” to educate audio enthusiasts in the foolishness of preferring LPs over CDs or music files, and to save them from spending money on expensive electronics. “Wire makes no difference,” he wrote: “It’s all about the speakers and the room.”


The question that would enter the minds of most intelligent, well-adjusted people is: Why should he care? If, as a consumer, he’s satisfied with digital sources, op-amp–based electronics, and lamp cord, then he’s a wise man to avoid buying anything else. But I can’t work out how consumers can or should be “saved” from buying perfectionist-quality goods that they have either auditioned at length or purchased with a home-trial policy—things that currently seem to characterize most purchases of audio gear. It’s not as if these people are being asked to blindly spend a three- or four-figure sum on a bottle of wine to which a reviewer they’ve never seen in public has awarded a 91—something that happens every damn day.


Again: Why should anyone care? Again, the answer is: They should not.


Unless, of course, such a person is a male who believes it’s flatly, unacceptably wrong to enjoy certain products, and who considers the work of every prancing, preening, purple-prose-penning audio reviewer who extols the virtues of such products to be an assault on his rightness. I mean—how dare they?


Girl Talk, or, The Chicken Curse
In the December 2018 issue of Stereophile I wrote about the evening when a review sample of a power amplifier caught fire and filled my little house with acrid smoke. It happened just as I was about to put a chicken in the oven.


Today, a Sunday in January, was the first time since then that I’d set about roasting a chicken. I put it in the oven at 4pm, then went upstairs to take a shower. While I was in the shower, the power went out. Swear to God.


I came downstairs and conferred with my wife and daughter, the latter home from college, who shared my suspicion that ours was not the only house affected. I stepped outside and found a couple of neighbors wandering the sidewalks with dazed, expectant looks on their faces. By the time I came back inside, my daughter, Julia, had used her phone to visit the local utility’s website, and learned that ours was one of perhaps 20,000 households affected. There was nothing we could do.




Footnote 1: Anolis carolinensis, aka the American chameleon, which made a surprise cameo appearance in the February 2018 issue.

This is the 100th and—surprise!—final edition of Music in the Round. MitR began in mid-2003, shortly after SACD and DVD-A discs made high-quality multichannel music convenient and widely available. At the time, I was convinced that multichannel reproduction was superior to stereo because it was able to reproduce the full sound of the performance—not just the performers. Stereophile‘s founder, J. Gordon Holt, had promoted this idea many times, but the appearance of the new media finally brought it to a wider audience. I recall that, when then-Editor John Atkinson and I floated the idea of a column on multichannel audio, we had to promise our publisher that it would not deal with anything having to do with video or home theater, lest it impinge on the territory of sister publications. We readily agreed: In keeping with Stereophile‘s mission, the column has always been about optimizing the music-listening experience.


Back then, we were so grateful for every new music release that we gobbled them up, sometimes regardless of whether the content exactly suited our taste. We sought hardware to play the discs, even if integration with the rest of our components was clumsy. We foresaw a future in which multichannel would supplant stereo, just as stereo succeeded mono, simply because it was technically and aesthetically superior. Multichannel recordings would become the “lingua franca” of the music industry and hardware to play it would be the default, especially for the serious audiophile.


Despite all that, even today, nothing more than casual references to multichannel music playback appear in the pages of audio magazines. Even in Stereophile, Music in the Round is a niche: too easily passed over and possibly beyond the notice of many readers. This contrasts with the interest and attention paid to it all over the Internet and in my email inbox. General awareness requires general exposure.


To this end, Stereophile will now integrate multichannel products and recordings into the main editorial content of Stereophile. Jim Austin decided to make this change during a long discussion on the eve of his elevation to the position of Editor. Our conversation acknowledged multichannel as a valid and important facet of high-quality music reproduction, both scientifically and aesthetically, even as it remains a small niche.


Intrinsic to this change is the idea that multichannel product coverage will now be offered in full equipment reports and will be subject to measurements and analyses by Technical Editor John Atkinson, something for which I and many readers have long wished. It may even result in other reviewers venturing into multichannel—who knows?


I know many may miss this platform for advancing multichannel audio, but I’m glad to be free from the yoke of the bimonthly cycle. With the editor’s encouragement, I will now investigate and report on new technology as it applies to all aspects of audio. I have new equipment reviews loaded into the pipeline, including stereo and multichannel products. Equally important to me is the time flexibility to explore and listen to music. At this moment, my music collection consists of about 40,000 multichannel files/tracks, plus another 30,000 stereo tracks. I’m adding new releases all the time.


“Best sound of my life” is what a good friend of mine recently posted about his own multichannel experience. I second that. I hope that many more of you will feel the same way as Stereophile moves multichannel into the mainstream.


Looking back and looking forward
During the 16 years my column has been published, Apple’s iTunes and the rising popularity of portable personal players fostered the mass market’s drive toward the cheap and the convenient. This may have been good for most of the world, but it diverted aspirational interest away from high-quality audio and resulted in the commercial failure of such physical media as DVD-A, SACD, and ultimately CD. On the other hand, it planted the seeds for the explosion of interest in quality headphones, music streaming, and downloading.


With the near-extinction of physical discs, the shrinkage in the market for disc players is no surprise. High-end two-channel players survive, for the time being, but analog outputs are disappearing from “universal” players, leaving HDMI as the only multichannel output option. The gravestone of multichannel analog player outputs is marked with Oppo’s withdrawal from the market. In a world without physical media, this was inevitable.


Streaming and downloading, along with file playback, represent the future of the music business and of multichannel. You can still buy and play SACDs and Blu-ray discs, but fans of all types of music are now ripping these and storing the files in collections from which they have near-instant access to everything. I note with pleasure that streaming site Qobuz now has a few dozen high-resolution multichannel albums: You can stream them in 5.1 channels at 24/96 via Roon! It isn’t a wide range of repertoire, but just the idea that it’s on a streaming service thrills me as much as my first file playback (or my first LP).


For a short while during the first decade of this century, the prospect of multichannel music as a new product category encouraged the audio industry to offer up a wave of suitable analog preamps and power amps, but the rising tide of home theater swept that away. We had hoped that the popularity of surround systems for home theater would encourage interest in multichannel music, but the general public never appreciated that music playback could go beyond stereo, even when they already had the ability to play “surround sound” recordings in their homes. Still, many avid HT enthusiasts ask how to play multichannel files through their theater equipment, via connections other than the obvious and somewhat compromised HDMI.


The answer is that AVRs and preamp-processors have become network appliances, and nothing is needed, save a little firmware, to enable them as multichannel renderers on a home network. These are inherently multichannel audio devices armed with networking hardware, yet they’re not set up to accept multichannel audio via their Ethernet inputs. It’s disturbing that most manufacturers don’t seem to recognize how illogical this is. Consider the Trinnov Altitude preamp-processors, which can stream multichannel from my server without complications: We should demand similar capabilities from all such products.


How to do multichannel today
Here’s a quick parting shot on how to get into multichannel music playback.


FILE STORAGE: A high-resolution multichannel track, even compressed, can take up more than a gigabyte, so storage capacity is important. Think in terms of terabytes (TB). Hard drives are essential, and an NAS (network-attached storage) device, which combines and organizes an array of drives, quickly becomes inevitable. Using a NAS also allows you to relocate the relatively noisy storage device to a place outside the listening room where it’s still accessible via Ethernet or Wi-Fi. A remotely located backup copy or two of everything is essential! Eventually, every drive will fail, and without backup you face the horror of losing some or all of your music collection.


MUSIC PLAYER HARDWARE: In choosing storage media, the only distinction between the requirements for multichannel and stereo is capacity. For the player hardware, the big issues are noise and processing power. If you are content to play the music as it is, without any processing, Roon’s compact and fanless Nucleus or Nucleus+ will do the job without fuss, although they are restricted to using Roon software. You can save money and gain flexibility by buying an i5 or i7 NUC computer, or by using almost any quiet but capable processor—including the one built into your NAS—as long sufficient muscle. MacOS, Windows, Linux . . . there is software for all, so you can choose whichever OS suits. In fact, you can start the process rolling with whatever computer you already have around (footnote 1).


Footnote 1: There are a few proprietary packaged servers from vendors like SOtM, Nimitra, and DigiBitwork that will do high-resolution multichannel but, unfortunately, the majority of the excellent music servers reviewed in Stereophile will not—or at least do not support it officially.

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Ohm Acoustics F loudspeaker

May 27, 2020 | News | No Comments

We have still not received a pair of these for formal testing, which may be a good thing in view of our feelings these days about “updatings.” (Our feelings about such are clarified in this issue’s “As We See It.”)


We auditioned Ohm Fs in three audio stores, and came away with five reactions. In one store, the two speakers we heard sounded similar to one another, but not terribly impressive. Stereo imaging was extraordinarily good, which has been the case with every truly omnidirectional speaker system we have heard, but the middle range of the Ohm Fs was rather markedly colored, with a vowel-like “eh” quality, and the low end struck us as being overly heavy and way out of proportion to the high end, although it did at least sound fairly smooth.


In the other two instances, the two speakers of the stereo pair of Fs hardly sounded like the same speakers. Midrange colorations were not only marked but different, with the result that: 1) stereo imaging was impaired; and 2) it was impossible to describe the sound of “the” Ohm F.


As far as we can see, the principle of this system has a great deal of promise, but dammit, doesn’t anyone debug new designs these days before going into production with them?—J. Gordon Holt


2019 Editor’s Note: 45 years after this review was published, Ohm Acoustics is still in business and still based in Brooklyn. Stereophile has reviewed two other Ohm loudpeakers in the intervening years, the the Ohm Walsh 5 in June 1987 and August 1988 and the Ohm CAM 16 in April 1989. To judge from our experience in those reviews, the QA problems noted by JGH have long since been resolved.—John Atkinson

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MADISON, WI — The Wisconsin Supreme Court has struck down the state’s “Safer-At-Home” order, stating that Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ administration overstepped its legal boundaries when crafting the order.

Under the ruling, the Wisconsin Supreme Court concluded that the order was “unlawful, invalid and unenforceable.” The court ruling was 4-3 in favor of striking down the governor’s emergency order.

Wisconsin, which has drawn the attention of federal officials with the Department of Homeland Security for possessing one of the country’s highest COVID-19 case growth rates, has now seen its statewide order governing everything from school and business closures to nonessential travel and social distancing, overturned. The court’s decision is effective immediately.


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In the majority opinion issued Wednesday night, the State Supreme Court stated that Department of Health Services Secretary Andrea Palm did not follow the law in creating the “Safer-At-Home” Order, and as a result, there can be no criminal penalties for violations of her order.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) was an ardent backer of the lawsuit, and said Wednesday night that he’s looking to come up with a new plan for opening the state back up in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

“When we met with Governor Evers a week ago, we asked him to begin negotiating with us on a plan for reopening. He politely declined and said we should wait for the court decision. Now that the decision has been rendered, we are confident Wisconsin citizens are up to the task of fighting the virus as we enter a new phase,” Vos wrote.

Gov. Evers said Wednesday night’s ruling was a setback, but that if Wisconsin residents continue to act with public health and safety in mind, the state can persevere through the pandemic. In the meantime, Evers wrote, he’s hoping state lawmakers can put together a good enough plan moving forward.

“This virus has killed more than 400 of our family members, friends, and neighbors and thousands more across our state are sick. I am disappointed in the decision today, but our top priority has been and will remain doing what we can and what we have to do to protect the health and safety of the people of our state. After months of unproductive posturing, I hope the folks in the Legislature are ready to do the same,” Evers wrote.

Prior to the lawsuit, Evers directed State Department of Health Services Secretary Andrea Palm to extend the order from April 24 to May 27.

In their lawsuit, Republican state legislators claimed that an “un-elected, unconfirmed cabinet secretary laid claim to a suite of czar-like powers—unlimited in scope and indefinite in duration—over the people of Wisconsin.”

Republican lawmakers in their lawsuit sought a six-day reprieve from the order – enough time, they thought, to craft and implement a new order moving forward.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court didn’t see it that way.

“Although a very unusual request, on April 21, 2020, the Legislature asked this court to issue a temporary injunction of [the Safer At Home order] but then requested a stay of that injunction for at least six days. We perceive this request as being grounded in a concern for an orderly transition from [Safer At Home] to a lawful rule,” the court wrote in their majority opinion.

Instead, the court wrote that they “trust that the Legislature and Palm have placed the interest of the people of Wisconsin first and have been working together in good faith.” For that reason, the court struck down the order in full, and are now leaving it up to lawmakers and the DHS to come up with something different.

Lawmakers were split on the issue, largely along party lines. State Sen. Chris Kapenga of Waukesha County praised the court’s decision.

“Effective immediately, Wisconsin is back open. It is now up to each individual person to decide how restrictive they feel they need to be, instead of the government mandating it. The legislature will now begin to work through how to properly handle these situations should they arise in the future,” State Sen. Chris Kapenga (R-Delafield) wrote Wednesday night.

Others, like Racine Mayor Cory Mason, a former Democratic state representative, criticized the court’s ruling.

“This reckless decision will almost certainly mean that the pandemic lasts longer and the health consequences will be even more severe, particularly in places like Racine which is seeing a spike in cases and savage disparities among communities of color. I urge City residents to continue to take the necessary steps to protect yourself, your families, and the community,” he wrote Wednesday night.

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Près d’un enfant sur cinq ne mange pas à sa faim aux Etats-Unis depuis le début de la pandémie, selon un rapport publié mercredi par un cercle de réflexion américain.

La Brookings Institution y analyse les résultats de deux études nationales menées récemment pour mesurer l’impact de la

crise du Covid-19 dans le pays.Dans l’une de ces deux études, 17,4% des mères d’enfants de 12 ans et moins interrogées disent ne pas pouvoir suffisamment nourrir leur progéniture par manque d’argent.”Il est évident que les enfants les plus jeunes souffrent d’insécurité alimentaire à un degré sans précédent à l’époque contemporaine“, note Lauren Bauer, qui a compilé le rapport pour la Brooking Institution.”L’insécurité alimentaire des foyers comptant des enfants de 18 ans et moins a augmenté de 130% par rapport à 2018“, appuie-t-elle.Certains parents, alerte la chercheuse, sont contraints de réduire les portions dans les assiettes, voire carrément de faire sauter des repas à leurs enfants.En cause notamment: l’interruption de programmes de distribution de repas dans les écoles, fermées à cause de la pandémie, explique-t-elle, appelant les autorités à venir en aide à ces populations défavorisées.Au moins 30 millions d’Américains ont fait une demande d’allocation chômage depuis le début de la pandémie.Le taux de chômage du mois d’avril, qui doit être annoncé vendredi, pourrait approcher les 20%, un niveau jamais atteint dans le pays depuis la Grande Dépression des années 1930.Les Etats-Unis ont enregistré au total plus d’1,2 million de cas de nouveau coronavirus, pour près de 73.000 décès, selon le comptage, actualisé en continu, de l’université Johns Hopkins.Click Here: camiseta rosario central

NEW YORK — Major League Baseball owners gave the go-ahead Monday to making a proposal to the players’ union that could lead to the coronavirus-delayed season starting around the Fourth of July weekend in ballparks without fans, a plan that envisioned expanding the designated hitter to the National League for 2020.

Spring training would start in early to mid-June, a person familiar with the decision told The Associated Press. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the plan were not announced.

Each team would play about 82 regular-season games: against opponents in its own division plus interleague matchups limited to AL East vs. NL East, AL Central vs. NL Central and AL West vs. NL West.

Postseason play would be expanded from 10 clubs to 14 by doubling wild cards in each league to four.

Teams would prefer to play at their regular-season ballparks but would switch to spring training stadiums or neutral sites if medical and government approvals can’t be obtained for games at home. Toronto might have to play home games in Dunedin, Florida.

The All-Star Game, scheduled for Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles on July 14, likely would be called off.

Teams will propose that players receive the percentage of their 2020 salaries based on a 50-50 split of revenues the MLB receives during the regular season and postseason, which likely will be among the most contentious aspects of the proposal during negotiations with the players’ association.

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That proposal would take into account fans being able to return to ballparks at some point, perhaps with a small percentage of seats sold at first and then gradually increasing.

Rosters would be expanded from 26 to around 30. With minor leagues shuttered, there likely will be the addition of about 20 players per club akin to the NFL’s practice squad.

MLB officials are slated to make a presentation to the union Tuesday.

Players and teams agreed to a deal March 26 that called for each player to receive only a portion of salary, determined by what percentage of a 162-game schedule is played. As part of that deal, if no season is played, each player would receive 2020 service time matching what the player earned in 2019.

But that deal is contingent there being no restrictions on mass gatherings at the federal, state, city and local level; no relevant travel restrictions in the U.S. and Canada; and Commissioner Rob Manfred after consulting the union and medical expects, determining there is no risk to playing in front of fans at regular-season ballparks.

Players and teams committed to “discuss in good faith the economic feasibility of playing games in the absence of spectators or at appropriate neutral sites.” Manfred has said about 40 percent of MLB revenue is tied to gate, including concessions, parking, ballpark advertising, luxury suites and programs.

Union officials and players have cited the March 26 agreement as setting economic terms and say they have no inclination for additional cuts. Players are more interested in medical protocols and testing designed to detect and protect them from the new coronavirus. The proposal will detail the plan for dealing with players and staff who test positive.

Because players accrue salaries for the regular season only and not for spring training or the postseason, the union may counter by asking for more regular-season games during negotiations that could significantly alter or possibly even scuttle the restart plan.

The DH was adopted by the American League for the 1973 season but has been resisted by National League owners. The players’ union has favored it because it would create more jobs for high-paying hitters in their 30s, but MLB has looked at it as an economic issue.

However, money has disappeared as an issue at this stage for 2020 because nearly all veteran players have agreed to contracts. Yasiel Puig is the most notable exception.

By Ronald Blum, Associated Press Baseball Writer

MILLBURN, NJ — In the mid-1980s, the coat factory where Maria Petrilli worked closed down and gave her some materials.

Among those were huge rolls of elastic.

Petrilli, a senior citizen, has finally found a good use for them. Recently, she made over 500 masks from the rolls, donating them to senior citizens and hospitals over the last month.

Millburn Mayor Jackie Lieberberg cited Petrilli’s work in her Friday night coronavirus update.

“Thank you Maria,” Lieberberg wrote. “Your generosity and hard work are very much appreciated!”

The mayor also noted that as of Friday, there were 117 confirmed patients with covid 19 in the township. She said half of the residents had recovered. Four have passed away.

If you have symptoms, you can schedule an appointment at the county testing site in Newark by going here www.EssexCOVID.org. Call 973-324-9950 if you do not have internet service.

Lieberberg noted, “We are urging residents to not let their guard down. Stay vigilant and maintain social distancing guidelines. We are making great strides with our efforts and patience. Hang in there and continue to comply by wearing a face coverings or masks in essential stores, social distancing in our parks, on our streets and on our sidewalks. Please walk against traffic. This significantly helps maintain social distancing where sidewalks don’t exist.”

If you want to find out more about getting food or other help in Millburn, or volunteering, click on our Millburn coronavirus roundup from this week here.

Got news? Email caren.lissner@patch.com. To keep up with Westfield and statewide announcements, sign up for free Patch breaking news alerts and daily newsletters.

Des caméras thermiques ont été déployées à l’aéroport de Paris-Charles-de-Gaulle (CDG) pour détecter à leur arrivée d’éventuels porteurs du

Covid-19, a annoncé mercredi ADP, le gestionnaire de l’aéroport.

La caméra permet d’identifier dans le flot de voyageurs, après récupération de leurs bagages, les passagers présentant une température supérieure à 38 degrés, en marquant le contour du visage, flouté, d’un cadre rouge.La température est ensuite confirmée avec un thermomètre sans contact et le voyageur conduit au service médical d’urgence de l’aéroport où son éventuelle contamination pourra être testée.ADP a acheté 12 caméras de ce type déployées dans un cadre fixé par la Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (Cnil) “pour convaincre chacun que le transport aérien est un transport sûr“, a commenté le directeur exécutif de Groupe ADP Edward Arkwright.”La sécurité sanitaire c’est la succession de mesures de contrôle, de vigilance qui permet de créer un environnement contrôlé et de confiance“, a expliqué le secrétaire d’Etat aux Transport Jean-Baptiste Djebbari au cours d’une visite de l’aéroport.Click Here: All Blacks Rugby Jersey

Une étude réalisée au moment le plus critique de l’épimédie de Covid-19 en Chine pointe des cas fréquents d’insomnie et de dépression chez le personnel soignant.

Selon les chiffres officiels, l’

épidémie de Covid-19 a provoqué plus de 3.300 décès en Chine, pays où le virus est initialement apparu en décembre 2019. Au-delà des pertes humaines dramatiques provoquées par cette crise sanitaire, les effets sur la santé mentale sont également importants, en particulier celle du personnel soignant, souligne une nouvelle recherche parue dans la revue

 Frontiers in Psychiatry. 
Dirigée par des chercheurs de l’université de médecine du Sud à Guangzhou (Chine), l’enquête a été réalisée à partir d’une série de questionnaires soumis à 1.563 soignants placés en première ligne dans la

lutte contre le nouveau coronavirus. Les réponses ont été collectées entre le 29 janvier et le 3 février sur le réseau social WeChat.
Plus d’un tiers des participants, soit 564 personnes, ont déclaré des

symptômes d’insomnie au cours de cette période. Les auteurs de l’étude précisent que cette statistique est conforme aux recherches précédentes menées sur les effets psychologiques de l’épidémie de SRAS en 2002.
Chez les personnes souffrant d’insomnie, les niveaux de

dépression étaient également nettement plus élevés que chez les autres répondants (87,1% contre 31%). En revanche, les pourcentages de réponses vis-à-vis de l’anxiété et des traumatismes liés à l’épidémie se sont avérés similaires entre tous les soignants qui ont participé au sondage. 
Le fait d’être constamment en contact étroit avec des patients infectés, la crainte de contracter le virus et de le transmettre à ses proches sont les raisons les plus fréquemment évoquées pour décrire cette anxiété. 
 
Les auteurs de la publication attirent également l’attention sur les conditions de travail stressantes pour les soignants : “Le personnel médical devait porter un ensemble complet d’équipements de protection individuelle (EPI) pendant plus de 12 heures d’affilée, sans pause. (…) Dans ces conditions dangereuses, le personnel médical s’épuise mentalement et physiquement et court donc un risque accru d’insomnie en raison du stress élevé“, explique le chercheur Chenxi Zhang, qui a dirigé les travaux.Dans ses conclusions, l’équipe de recherche suggère un suivi à long terme de ces symptômes pour une meilleure prévention chez les soignants. Elle fournit également plusieurs pistes pour atténuer les troubles du sommeil, notamment la thérapie cognitivo-comportementale spécialisée dans la lutte contre l’insomnie.Click Here: cd universidad catolica