The Crystal Semiconductor Products Division of Cirrus Logic Inc. announced last week the availability of the industry's first digital audio transmitters and receivers designed to support the emerging 96kHz digital audio sampling rate. The new mixed-signal receivers and transmitters are targeted at both the professional audio and consumer DVD audio markets.
When Bob Graham introduced his <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//analogsourcereviews/400/">1.5 tonearm</A> at the end of the 1980s, many thought he was dreaming: Vinyl was going the way of the console radio—who would invest two-grand-plus in a <I>tonearm</I>? But there was a method to Graham's madness—he'd designed his arm to be a drop-in replacement for more than 20 years' worth of SME arms, all of which shared the same mounting platform. Perhaps, in his wildest dreams, Graham had already envisioned the current "analog revival"—but even without it, he figured there'd be a robust replacement market, and he was poised to exploit it with what he thought was a superior product.
The least expensive model in Paradigm's Reference series, the Studio/20 loudspeaker is a rear-ported two-way dynamic bookshelf/satellite design, superficially identical to the powered Active/20 that <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/597/">JA reviewed last November</A>. It features Paradigm's 25mm PAL pure-aluminum dome tweeter in a die-cast heatsink chassis, and a 170mm MLP mica-polymer cone in an AVS die-cast heatsink chassis with a 38mm voice coil. The crossover is third-order, quasi-Butterworth, said to be "phase-coherent." It features high-power ceramic resistors, film capacitors in all signal paths, and both air-core and steel-core inductors.
While the DVD Consortium's Working Group 4 (WG-4) is still working on the 0.9 specification for DVD-Audio, Sony and Philips have been silently carrying on work on their Super Audio CD, the consumer implementation of Sony's DSD. The Sony/Philips disc will have two layers, one carrying normal 44.1kHz, 16-bit CD information (and thus guaranteeing backwards compatibility with existing CD players), the other carrying eight channels in DSD format (two for high-quality stereo, six for surround), plus text and/or graphics.
Last week, <A HREF="http://www.intel.com">Intel Corporation</A> announced its membership in the DVD WG-4 Audio Working Group, and its support for the proposed DVD audio specification, as the next steps in bringing next-generation consumer-quality audio to the PC platform.
The market for recorded music, measured by what manufacturers ship to retail and non-retail channels, experienced a decline in unit shipments and dollar value according to a <A HREF="http://www.riaa.com">Recording Industry Association of America</A> (RIAA) report released February 19. Concurrently, accounts from US record retailers and mass merchandisers indicated a banner 1997.
It is often said that an audiophile is someone who spends half his time feeling unhappy with his system and the other half tweaking it. Is your audio life heaven or hell? After choosing your answer, tell us why you feel that way.
On February 18, <A HREF="http://www.harman.com">Harman International Industries Inc.</A> announced that it had signed two licensing agreements with <A HREF="http://www.nxt.co.uk">New Transducers Limited</A> (NXT) relating to NXT's flat-panel loudspeaker technology.
February 20---Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazil's president, has signed into law two bills intended to rein in that nation's widespread abuse of intellectual properties and bring Brazil into compliance with worldwide copyright law. One covers software piracy; the other, authorship rights.
This week, <A HREF="http://www.burr-brown.com">Burr-Brown</A> Corporation announced the PCM1733, a low-cost, CD-quality audio digital-to-analog converter (DAC) designed for high-volume, mass-market consumer audio applications.