LATEST ADDITIONS

Nothing like scarcity to create demand, right? Well, there's been a scarcity of Nuvistors out there for decades, and hardly any demand. Do you know about the Nuvistor, aka the 6CW4? It was a tiny triode tube smaller than your average phono cartridge. Enclosing its vacuum in metal rather than glass, the Nuvistor was designed as a long-lived, highly linear device with low heat, low microphony, and low noise---all of which it needed to have any hope of competing in the brave new solid-state world emerging when RCA introduced it in the 1960s.

Sony has finally released SACD hardware, and DVD-Audio is promised for sometime next year, but none of the first players have digital outputs. Is this a problem for you?

FireWire's prospects got a little hotter last week, as equipment manufacturers <A HREF="http://www.denon.com">Denon Electronics</A> and <A HREF="http://www.onkyous.com">Onkyo</A&gt; announced new license agreements with <A HREF="http://www.digitalharmony.com">Digital Harmony Technologies</A>. The companies say that they have selected Digital Harmony to add standards-based IEEE-1394 (aka FireWire or iLink) interfaces to their product lines, and both companies expect to release Digital Harmony-powered products in 2000, each certified for compatibility with a number of 1394-based products made by other Digital Harmony partners in the US and Europe.

Do high-end cables make an audible difference? Or are they cosmetic enhancements, like fancy wheels on high-performance cars? The <A HREF="http//:www.nytimes.com/"><I>New York Times</I></A>, the nation's foremost newspaper, took up the issue in a December 23 piece in "Circuits," its weekly technology section.

Despite the recent defeat of DVD-Audio's copy-protection scheme (see <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10620/">previous story</A>), Pioneer Electronics has decided to move forward with its plan to release two models of its high-resolution players in Japan. The announcement was made December 14 by company executives in Tokyo, who said that delaying the format's launch at this late stage could do irreparable damage to its acceptance by music fans. Super Audio Compact Disc, a competing format developed by the Sony/Philips alliance, is already beginning to win converts.

We've all heard of the entrepreneur who liked a product so much that he bought the company. Such bold steps are sometimes wildly successful. Case in point: Mark Levinson and his high-end startup, <A HREF="http://www.redrosemusic.com/">Red Rose Music</A>.

Almost beaten to death in the past couple of years by salesfolk, pundits, and journalists, "convergence" has been applied to the coming-together of audio and video, analog and digital, hardware and software, information and entertainment, and Democrats and Republicans. Among all these merging trends, the audiophile community rarely hears about the convergence of pro audio with the High End.