LATEST ADDITIONS

It may come as a surprise to relative newcomers to the field of audio, but some loudspeaker manufacturers are manufacturers in only a limited sense. They buy drivers, off-the-shelf or custom-built, from companies like VIFA, SEAS, Focal, etc.; cabinets from a woodworking shop; and crossovers from an electronics subcontractor. While the system design will have taken place in-house, actual manufacturing is restricted to assembling the components, perhaps tweaking the crossover, and final QC. Even some highly successful loudspeaker manufacturers use this approach, which can work well as long as the suppliers do their jobs properly.

Whenever a new format rolls out, there's always the fear among manufacturers that consumers will stop buying current models while waiting to see what happens with the new ones. Is this true for SACD and DVD-Audio?

One can almost imagine how it all started: "Hey, you got a computer in my audio system." "No, you got an audio system in my computer . . . "

Back when DVD players were first released in the US, <A HREF="http://www.classicrecs.com/">Classic Records</A> was among the first companies to exploit the fact that early machines, though intended for the video enthusiast, could play a 24-bit/96kHz audio recording as well as movies (see <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10072/">previous story</A>). These early high-resolution discs, which Classic called DADs, were intended to hold us over until DVD-Audio (then thought to be just around the corner) would finally hit the market. More than two years later we're still waiting for DVD-A, but Classic intends to be ready when it finally appears.

Making good its intention to move heavily into the ever-expanding consumer-electronics market, <A HREF="http://www.ti.com/">Texas Instruments</A> has announced that it will acquire chipmaker <A HREF="http://www.burrbrown.com/">Burr-Brown Corporation</A> for $7.6 billion in stock. Burr-Brown makes some of the most highly regarded A/D and D/A converter chips on the market, many of them used in high-end audio and home-theater products.

For months now, the music industry has concentrated all its legal firepower on <A HREF="http://www.napster.com/">Napster</A&gt;, the Silicon Valley&ndash;based software company that lets users share music; and against San Diego's <A HREF="http://www.mp3.com/">MP3.com</A&gt;, which lets users upload their music to a central server and then access it from any Internet-connected computer. As of the end of June, it appears that MP3.com will likely be co-opted by the industry's Big Five until it is no longer a threat&mdash;two of the major labels have already settled with the startup&mdash;but Napster will fight on.

It was 2am on January 8, 2000, and I was sitting at the bar of the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas. I'd just arrived for the Consumer Electronics Show and was recovering from a stressful day of travel. The airlines have a new computerized ticketing technology called the "electronic ticket": you get a reservation and a confirmation number, but no physical plane ticket, itinerary, or the feelings of security that accompany those pieces of paper.