LATEST ADDITIONS

Sharp Electronics has announced a new lineup of "one-bit" digital amplifiers that may herald a new generation of audio products.

The public learned last week that some regular CDs are now secretly being copy-protected (see this week's audio news). Is this an issue for you?

The year has been a good one so far for New York's Harvey Electronics and for national electronics retailer the <A HREF="http://www.tweeter.com">Tweeter Group</A>. The news isn't so rosy for West Coast chain the Good Guys.

There appears to be nothing more important to the music business today than controlling the distribution and use of digital content on the web and in the home. Proprietary schemes to prevent or control the use of audio files have become hot commodities and valuable assets for many companies. <A HREF="http://www.liquidaudio.com">Liquid Audio</A> recently announced that the US Patent Office has awarded the company a patent (#6,219,634) for its watermark technique used for distributing secure digital music files.

In what is intended to have the biggest impact yet on the thriving "rip, mix, burn" lifestyle, <A HREF="http://www.macrovision.com">Macrovision</A&gt; has revealed that several record labels have been secretly putting its copy protection system onto new CD releases since around March of this year (see <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10985/">previous report</A>). The process, called SafeAudio, is a Macrovision registered trademark and is intended to prevent the copying of CDs, or tracks from CDs, onto CD-R discs and computer hard drives. The technology was developed jointly by Macrovision and <A HREF="http://www.ttrtech.com">TTR Technologies</A>.

We were saddened to learn of the death of audio guru Harvey "Gizmo" Rosenberg, who died Monday, July 16 of an apparent heart attack. He was 59.

I have to remember how seriously audiophiles follow Stereophile. Reader David Zappardon's (davida@gscyclone.com) e-mail to me began with "Hello, my friend." But I have to admit to feeling some guilt when he yowled that he'd wasted two fruitless hours of his time looking for the silver-bearing conductive grease I'd mentioned in the October 2000 "Fine Tunes."