LATEST ADDITIONS

Last week, <A HREF="http://www.semiconductors.com/">Philips Semiconductors</A> announced the CD10 chipset, which the company describes as the world's first two-chip solution to deliver CD-RW (compact disc, re-writeable) compatibility for CD audio players. According to Philips, one chip provides a data amplifier and laser supply circuit, while the other is the digital servo, decoder, and DAC. As a result, Philips claims that the new chipset allows designers to build audio players that can read all forms of CDs without an increase in component count.

Do you suffer socially because of your audio obsession?

One would think that the Internet was growing crowded with online music retailers such as CDnow/N2K, Amazon.com, EveryCD, and Tower Records, just to name a few, all hustling CDs. But the lure of gold in them e-commerce hills is hard to resist. Last week, <A HREF="http://barnesandnoble.com">barnesandnoble.com</A&gt; jumped into the fray and announced the launch of its own Music Store, featuring what the company describes as the first "online classical music superstore." Notably late to market with its online bookselling franchise, barnesandnoble.com hopes to gain ground against arch-rival Amazon.com by expanding beyond books and better focusing on niche markets.

The <A HREF="http://www.jeffrowland.com/">Jeff Rowland Design Group</A> is alive and well and in no danger of going out of business. The company was the victim of hackers who recently broke into the company's website and posted a notice to the contrary.

Since the earliest days of stereo&mdash;the first experiments with more than single-channel sound happened back in the 1930s&mdash;recording and playback have been based on a horizontal model: left-center-right, left-rear, right-rear. "Laterality," as it's sometimes called, can be exploited very well in creating plausible sensations of spatial events, especially by film-industry sound engineers. The believable reproduction of music is considerably more problematic.

Wes Phillips writes, "I catch John's eye and wonder if he's pondering the same question I am: <I>What were we thinking?</I>" In addition to trying to push forward the limits of getting great sound onto tape, <I>Stereophile</I>'s release of <I>Rhapsody In Blue</I> would offer the public a groundbreaking arrangement of George Gershwin's most popular orchestral work. In "<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//features/124/">The <I>Rhapsody</I> Project</A>," Hyperion Knight and John Atkinson join Wes in chronicling their perspectives on the processes leading to this landmark recording.

The patter of the snare drum began softly and I leaned forward in my seat. Avery Fisher Hall fell silent as Riccardo Muti led the New York Philharmonic in Ravel's <I>Bol&#233;ro</I>. Ravel once described this masterpiece as "lasting 17 minutes and consisting wholly of orchestral texture without music&mdash;of one long, very gradual crescendo." Though the hall was silent and expectant, the stage was packed with musicians waiting for...what? To gradually join in, one by one and layer by layer, to drive that gentle but relentlessly mounting crescendo. Ravel accomplished this by "having solo instruments play the melody...[then progressing] to groups" and finally "arranging the scoring so that the dynamics are self-regulating" (footnote 1). When the final, thunderous E-major chord stopped the piece by locking "all its harmonic gears," the hall erupted in ecstatic applause, and we all leapt to our feet.