LATEST ADDITIONS

Investors have shown an inexplicable willingness to foot the bill for <A HREF="http://www.mp3.com/">MP3.com</A>'s $53.4 million settlement with <A HREF="http://www.umusic.com/">Universal Music Group</A>. In the four days following the announcement of a settlement on Tuesday, November 13, the now fully legitimate Internet music site watched its stock surge to four times the value it had only a month before. Shares of MP3.com closed Friday, November 17 at $9.42 each, triple the per-share price on the morning of the announcement. The stock had sunk to a 52-week low of $2.50 per share on October 11.

In his very English way, Sony's then managing director for the UK, Tim Steele, was getting a touch, er, desperate. His oh-so-cultured voice rose a smidgen as he resorted to a direct selling of the benefits of what he was talking about. "Look, you're all sitting on riches," was his fundamental pitch. "You can sell music-lovers your entire back catalog all over again&mdash;at a higher price!"

Although Philips invented the Compact Disc, it was only when Sony got involved in the early 1980s that it was decided&mdash;at the prompting of conductor Herbert von Karajan, a close friend of Sony's then-president Akio Morita&mdash;that the CD should have a long enough playing time to fit Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on a single disc (footnote 1). Even if the conductor was using very slow tempos, and even given the minimum pit size and track pitch printable at the time, the 16-bit data and 44.1kHz sampling rate they settled on gave them a little margin.

Have you ever noticed a time of day when your musical enjoyment seems to be consistently at its peak?

When CDs were becoming popular, Neil Young made no secret of his disdain for the sound of digital. Interviews from the period quoted him as saying that the sound "left him cold," and he would rather listen to an LP, thank you very much. To this day, his new CD releases also appear on vinyl, but with the advent of DVD-Audio, sampling and quantization rates have improved&mdash;enough, apparently for Mr. Young's approval.

For the music industry, copyright and royalty litigation is like an endless war fought on many fronts. During early November, as four of the industry's "Big Five" continued their pursuit of the file-sharing service Napster, a parallel trial in US Federal Court in New York against music archiving-and-accessing site <A HREF="http://www.mp3.com/">MP3.com</A&gt; by <A HREF="http://www.umusic.com/">Universal Music Group</A> entered its penalty phase, that segment of the proceeding in which aggrieved plaintiffs seek to extract money from guilty defendants. Other plaintiffs in the trial&mdash;Sony Music Entertainment, BMG, Warner Music, and EMI&mdash;have all settled with the San Diego-based Internet service for an average of $20 million each.

The Comdex trade show, taking place this week in Las Vegas, is flushing out scores of convergence consumer electronics products, in addition to the more traditional computer fare. <A HREF="http://www.apogeeddx.com">Apogee Technology</A>, formerly Apogee Acoustics, a name familiar to many <I>Stereophile</I> readers, is among the dozens of companies announcing technology for the modern consumer electronics marketplace.