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MP3 players are going to hit the market in waves this fall, and manufacturers will be trying hard to make their products stand out from the pack. Several companies are bringing out combi MP3/CD portables, including consumer-electronics newcomer <A HREF="http://www.pineusa.com/">Pine Technology USA</A>, of Fremont, California. Pine has long experience in the manufacture of motherboards, modems, and other computer components. The company is now shipping its $189 D'Music SM-320V MP3 portable. Its $219 model SM-320 includes an FM tuner. Both players have 32Mb of embedded solid-state memory and will accept a 32Mb SmartMedia card. Pine's players operate on two AAA batteries, and can double as voice recorders with up to 4.5 hours of recording capacity. Retailers include Fry's Electronics and Office Depot.

One of the challenges facing audio equipment manufacturers as we enter the Internet age is how to handle online retailing of products to consumers. A manufacturer that has so far shunned mail-order in favor of bricks-and-mortar retailing runs the risk of alienating its established distribution base by jumping online ("mail order with a web address"), where traditional territorial sales boundaries are often rendered meaningless.

Last week, <A HREF="http://www.peavey.com">Peavey Electronics</A> and <A HREF="http://www.digitalharmony.com">Digital Harmony</A> announced a licensing agreement that they say aims to revolutionize audio production, music publishing, and distribution. By licensing Digital Harmony Pro technology, Peavey says it plans to create the pro-audio industry's first non-proprietary 1394-equipped digital audio products and systems.

A never-ending controversy among <I>Stereophile</I>'s readers (and critics) is whether or not the equipment reviewed in the magazine is too pricey or not pricey enough. What do you think?

Sudden awareness of free digital downloadable music on the Internet sent the music industry into a panic last year. The <A HREF="http://www.sdmi.org/">Secure Digital Music Initiative</A>, a coalition of record labels, software companies, and electronics manufacturers, worked overtime developing standards for encrypting music in an attempt to thwart piracy. Preliminary guidelines for copyright protection were issued in June. Most recently, the SDMI completed a series of listening tests intended to find the least intrusive form of encryption. The organization seemed to present a united front in the anti-piracy war.

The Walkman is 20 years old. As part of its celebration of one of the most successful audio products in history, <A HREF="http://www.sony.com/">Sony</A&gt; has introduced its first personal music player with the capability of downloading music from the Internet. The new Walkman employs Sony's "memory stick" technology to store audio files as large as 32 megabytes. The latest Walkman, which was unveiled last week in Japan and New York, is expected to retail at approximately $400 and should appear in stores in January.

Last week at the Audio Engineering Society Convention in New York City, <A HREF="http://www.sonic.com">Sonic Solutions</A> announced that it plans to introduce what it says is the world's first digital audio workstation based on Sony's new Direct Stream Digital (DSD) technology. Sonic says that the new system, SonicStudio HD-DSD, is being developed in cooperation with <A HREF="http://www.sony.com">Sony Corporation</A> and will provide the recording industry with a mastering tool for the new Super Audio CD (SACD) format.