LATEST ADDITIONS

Everyone claims "CD-quality" sound over the Internet these days, but the reality always seems far short of that promise. As a result, work continues to develop an encoding scheme worthy of the CD-quality title. Recently we <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10133/">reported</A&gt; on developments at <A HREF="http://www.att.com">AT&T</A&gt; regarding the <A HREF="http://www.a2bmusic.com">a2b</A&gt; format, and both <A HREF="http://www.liquidaudio.com">Liquid Audio</A> and <A HREF="http://www.realnetworks.com">RealNetworks</A&gt; compete on a weekly basis to grab headlines for their audio technology announcements.

One billion dollars in 1997---that&#198;s the <A HREF="http://www.cema.org">Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association</A>'s first-ever estimate of the high-end industry's factory-sales volume. The number could be as high as $1.4 billion, according to a CEMA projection for the entire industry based on sales data of a representative sample of 32 companies. The results of the survey were published March 23 on CEMA's website.

PARA, the <A HREF="http://www.paralink.org/">Professional Audio-Video Retailers Association</A>, is bringing its annual management conference to the Hyatt Regency in Hilton Head, South Carolina, this week. The five-day event, running April 22-27, will focus on improving retail strategies. Representatives from more than 600 retailers, suppliers, and industry publications are expected.

WIth DVD-Audio on the horizon, the standards wars have led to a dizzying number of new format variations. Not only do we have different data-rate proposals, we're not even sure how many channels we need. Which do you prefer: a universal audio standard, or a niche-market approach?

Recently, <A HREF="http://www.analog.com/">Analog Devices</A> announced the world&#198;s first High Definition Compatible Digital (HDCD) decoder chip with 32-bit internal precision. The ADSP-21061 SHARC programmable digital signal processor will enable HDCD decoding to be incorporated into a wide variety of consumer audio and home-theater products, according to an AD press release dated March 26. The SHARC DSP can perform up to 150 million operations per second, and includes one megabit of onboard memory, six DMA channels, and two serial ports. The highly integrated decoder is claimed to perform HDCD decoding without external memory.

On April 8, <A HREF="http://www.nordicdms.com/">Nordic Entertainment Worldwide</A> announced that it has adopted ARIS Technologies' MusiCode audio watermarking system. The Napa, California-based company operates the Downloadable Music Site, one of the Internet's most extensive music archives. MusiCode is an attempt to discourage piracy by embedding signals in recorded music, which can later be extracted for tracking the recording&#198;s origin.

On April 7, <A HREF="http://www.carver.com">Carver Corp.</A> announced an agreement in principle for the sale of 3 million shares of restricted Common Stock of the company to one of its preferred shareholders, Renwick Special Situations Fund, L.P., for $375,000, or $0.125 per share.