LATEST ADDITIONS

Late August news bites: <A HREF="http://www.ti.com/">Texas Instruments</A> announced August 25 the completion of its acquisition of chipmaker <A HREF="http://www.burr-brown.com/">Burr-Brown Corporation</A> 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.

Last week, <A HREF="http://www.bmgentertainment.com/">BMG Entertainment</A>, the music and entertainment division of <A HREF="http://www.bertelsmann.de/">Bertelsmann AG</A>, revealed that it will join several other major labels (see previous stories <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10798/">EMI</A&gt; and <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10814/">Universal</A&gt;) by bringing its own digital downloads to the Internet this September. The company says that it will start with approximately 50 songs and 50 complete albums, to be made available via several retail Web outlets at prices ranging from $1.98 to $3.49 per song and from $9.98 to $16.98 per album.

One of the most enduring advertisments for an audio product is Maxell's image of the seated listener with his hair blowing back in the wind created by the tape's alleged sound quality. Have any other marketing campaigns stuck with you?

In an effort to move their businesses into cyberspace, record labels and audio content distributors are still experimenting with their online formulas. Key to the new economic models for selling music over the Net is this question: Would you rather pay a monthly subscription fee to download music, or pay for music track by track? According to market researcher <A HREF="http://gartner11.gartnerweb.com/public/static/home/home.html">Gartner Group</A>, sites that plan to sell music via the subscription model should seriously reconsider.

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 <A HREF="http://www.uic.edu/">University of Illinois at Chicago</A>. The potential loss of the neighborhood has sparked protests by a coalition of blues musicians, including a hunger strike by 69-year-old <A HREF="http://www.acousticsounds.com/">APO Records</A> 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.

Andy Payor hurls a briefcase full of engineering and scientific mumbo-jumbo at in an attempt to justify the $73,750 price of the latest and greatest edition of his Rockport Technologies turntable, but really&mdash;isn't this all-air-driven design a case of analog overkill? After all, defining a turntable's job seems rather easy: rotate the record at an exact and constant speed, and, for a linear tracker, put the stylus in play across the record surface so that it maintains precise tangency to a radius described across the groove surface. By definition, a pivoted arm can't do that, so the goal there is to minimize the deviation. That's basically it. Right?