LATEST ADDITIONS

When I first started buying records at the end of the 1950s, I had this vision of the typical recording engineer: A sound wizard wearing a white lab coat rather than a cloak festooned with Zodiacal symbols. He (it was always a "he," of course) would spare no effort, no expense to create a disc (LPs and 45s were all we had) that offered the highest possible sound quality. At that time I also believed that Elvis going into the Army meant the end of rock'n'roll, that my teachers knew everything, that politicians were honest, that socialism was the best form of government, and that talent and hard work were all you needed to be a success. Those ideas crashed and burned as I grew up, of course, but other than the long-discarded white coats, each new record I bought strengthened rather than weakened my image of the recording engineer.

"Desperation is the Mother of Invention." Isn't that how the proverb goes? Certainly it applied ten years ago in the case of the Philips engineers working on the development of the Compact Disc system. Given a specification that had included a 14-bit data word length, they had duly developed a 14-bit DAC chip, the TDA1540, only then to be informed that the CD standard decided upon after Sony joined forces with the Dutch company would involve 16-bit data words. (Thank goodness!)

<I>Everybody, including myself, was astonished to find that it was impossible to distinguish between my own voice, and Mr. Edison's re-creation of it.</I>&mdash;Anna Case, Metropolitan Opera Soprano, 1915

Audio retail revival: Electronics retailers throughout the US are ramping up their commitment to audio separates, according to a June 21 report by Joseph Palenchar in <I>TWICE</I> (This Week in Consumer Electronics). Palenchar describes the new emphasis on audio components as a response to declining margins on "home theater in a box" (HtiB) systems. Through April of this year, factory-to-dealer audio component sales rose 29.8% to $344.6 million, with April sales up 41.9%, hitting a four-year high of $86.9 million.

Will surround sound rejuvenate the music industry? That's the position many record label execs took when adding the capability to DVD-Audio and SACD years ago. But while they wait for the high-rez formats to catch on, <A HREF="http://www.srslabs.com">SRS Labs</A> has decided to add multichannel audio to the conventional compact disc.

The US Senate has gotten serious about going after file sharers. On Friday, June 25, senators approved legislation that would allow the Justice Department to impose heavy civil penalties on people found to have shared and/or downloaded copyrighted material over the Internet.

The NHT Xd DSP powered speaker demo was held at the Plaza Hotel in New York City last week and representatives from <A HREF="www.nhthifi.com">NHT</A&gt; and its supporting cast, <A HREF="http://www.deqx.com/">DEQX</A&gt; and <A HREF="http://www.PowerPhysics.com/">PowerPhysics</A&gt;, opened by explaining the philosophy behind the new product and the essential components they each contributed (also see <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/022304nht/index.html">previous</A&gt;).