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Analog and digital audio technologies should complement rather than oppose each other. That's Rotel's philosophy with its new RDV-1080 DVD-Audio player. Combining the best of Rotel's expertise in both realms, the RDV-1080 offers "stunning audio quality," according to Rotel general manager Michael Bartlett. "The RDV-1080 is Rotel's answer to those who have asked for a DVD-A player that focuses our Balanced Design engineering approach on the unique challenges of this exciting new format," Bartlett said. "Even though it handles the most advanced format today, DVD-A, the RDV-1080 is nonetheless a direct descendant of our world-class CD players." Bartlett says his company is "using everything we've learned to identify and solve problems unique to digital technologies."

Received wisdom has it that putting all your eggs in one basket isn't a good business plan, but that's exactly what Roxio, Inc. intends to do with its Napster online music service.

Some Webcasters were given a stay of execution in late June, when the Librarian of Congress announced that they would be required to pay royalties at half the rate proposed by an arbitration panel last winter.

In the age before recordings, music was a service business. Composers wrote for their patrons, and musicians performed for money. In the days since Edison's inventions, music has become a commodity business in which record companies stockpile large inventories and attempt to move them into the market of music lovers through a dense network of distributors and retailers. For established artists, the service aspect of music---playing for pay---now exists primarily to support the commodity business. For developing artists, public performance is a form of self-promotion to aid the search for a recording contract.

Ruth Laredo, a classical pianist whose style combined passionate ferocity with refined elegance, died May 25 of ovarian cancer, which she had battled for four years. Her last performance was May 6 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in one of her long-running performance/lecture sessions known as "Concertos with Commentary," a format that was so popular that she had begun to offer it in other venues around the world.

What's a home-entertainment show without an assortment of state-of-the-art audio demonstrations? EgglestonWorks has announced that its next generation Andra II speaker will be featured as part of what it calls an "unprecedented" demonstration of multichannel Super Audio CD (SACD) to be conducted during the upcoming Home Entertainment 2002 Show May 30 through June 2 at the New York Hilton.