LATEST ADDITIONS

Last week, <A HREF="http://www.verance.com">Verance</A&gt; announced that the US Patent and Trademark Office has issued them a new patent intended to prevent the disabling of a watermark on recorded content. The patent is entitled "Method and Apparatus for Preventing Removal of Embedded Information in Cover Signals." The company has recently drawn the ire of audiophiles, who claim that its watermarking methods are audible in high resolution media such as DVD-Audio recordings (see <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10807/">previous report</A>).

When it comes to purchasing and using electronics products, the gap between men and women appears to be disappearing. That's one conclusion reached by a study conducted in early October by eBrain Market Research and published by the <A HREF="http://www.ce.org/">Consumer Electronics Association</A>. The study, titled <I>Women, Men & Consumer Electronics</I>, questioned 1000 random households about their involvement with electronics technology.

First up, from the November, 2000 issue, is the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//amplificationreviews/291/">Hovland HP-100 preamplifier</A>. Michael Fremer writes, "While the HP-100 is Hovland's first publicly traded audio component, it is . . . the fulfillment of what's been Robert Hovland's goal all along: to bring such a product to market. Or so I was told. It's just taken 'some time to get it all right.' Given the company's history of more than 20 years, that sounds like an understatement." Fremer offers his sonic assessment.

In what may be the precursor to a deluge of lawsuits against electronics manufacturers, computer giant <A HREF="http://www.hp.com/">Hewlett-Packard</A&gt; has agreed to pay fees to German music licensing organization <A HREF="http://www.gema.de/eng/index.html">GEMA</A&gt; for revenue supposedly lost to piracy. Hewlett-Packard was targeted by GEMA last May, because the Palo Alto, Calfornia-based company's CD burners dominate the German market, and was originally asked to pay 30 marks ($12.90) for each unit sold in Germany since February, 1998.

I must share with you an e-mail from reader Gene Radice (mediphor@ptd.net), in response to my September "Fine Tunes," on avoiding slap-echo. "Your columns are so refreshing to read," it began.

If you search for "DVD-A" on this <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com">website</A&gt;, you can get the whole confusing story of the format, which has been the subject of one of the strangest format launches of recent years: First it's on, then it's off. The watermark is audible. No, it's not. Oops, it <I>is</I>&mdash;back to square one. There's software, there's no software. (There's <I>not</I>&mdash;only one demo disc officially available in September 2000, when I wrote this review!)

Metallica's Lars Ulrich and Creed's Scott Sapp don't get it. But Courtney Love understands, and so does Stereophile's Jon Iverson, who pointed out in the October issue's "As We See It" that the dispute between the RIAA and Napster is more important to audiophiles than it might seem. The Napster-MP3 phenomenon is a crack in the dike that controls music distribution. How the water seeps through that crack now will determine how it will flow when the drip turns into a trickle, the trickle into a stream, the stream into a river. Audiophiles and pop-music fans alike will be in the same boat.