News

Back in 1997, DVD-Audio was still miles away—and it may still be! But, as John Atkinson writes, "After a decade of stability, with slow but steady improvement in the quality of 16-bit/44.1kHz audio, the cry among audio engineers is now '24/96!'—meaning 24-bit data sampled at 96kHz. Not coincidentally, DVD offers audiophiles a medium with the potential for playing back music encoded at this new mastering standard." The dCS Elgar D/A processor was one of the first consumer units able to decode 24/96, and still stands as a benchmark product. JA gives the details.

Late August news bites: Texas Instruments announced August 25 the completion of its acquisition of chipmaker Burr-Brown Corporation in a stock swap. Burr-Brown is highly regarded in the audio industry for its low-noise, high-speed digital/analog converters and digital signal-processing (DSP) ICs. The company also makes ultra-high-quality analog components, a segment of the semiconductor industry expected to grow by 25% in the coming year, according to industry analyst Dataquest.

The Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) will soon move into Phase II of its evaluation of digital audio watermarking, following listening tests conducted in early July at Sony's Whitfield Street Studios in London and administered by Sony VP of engineering Malcolm Davidson. A soon-to-be-published report from Paul Jessop of the International Federation of Phonograph Industries reveals that the participants in the tests—almost all of them audio-industry professionals or journalists—averaged just slightly better than 50% in their abilities to detect the watermarks.

Chicago's Maxwell Street district is considered by many to be the birthplace of Chicago blues. But the old neighborhood is in danger of permanently losing some of its historic buildings, thanks to expansion plans by the University of Illinois at Chicago. The potential loss of the neighborhood has sparked protests by a coalition of blues musicians, including a hunger strike by 69-year-old APO Records artist Jimmie Lee Robinson.

E-wisdom holds that one of the big advantages about retailing on the Internet is that, once a comany is online, the entire world of consumers is only a few mouse clicks away. This concept holds up much better in theory than in practice. Language barriers, shipping costs, and import/export red tape (such as agreements controlling which countries a retailer can even sell a product line to) have all made the reality less than ideal for e-merchants.

When a manufacturer makes extraordinary claims about a product, the result is sometimes an extraordinary review. That's what happened when Jonathan Scull examined the Richard Gray's Power Company 400S AC line conditioner last June. His report raised a chorus of reader and industry reactions, all of them included here along with some additional unpublished observations.