News

In the December 2005 issue of the UK magazine Hi-Fi Plus, editor Roy Gregory announces that Absolute Multimedia, Inc., publisher of The Absolute Sound and The Perfect Vision magazines, has purchased the British audio journal.

This time last year the music industry was ready to celebrate. Compact disc sales were up for the first time in years, peer-to-peer file-sharing networks were reeling from lawsuits, ringtone sales were proving unexpectedly profitable, and legitimate (paid-for, that is) downloads were rising. But this year, Jim Urie, president of Universal Music Group, told The Wall Street Journal that Christmas 2005 was "a bleak holiday season at the end of a bleak year."

On December 16, Congressmen James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and John Conyers (D-MI) introduced HR">http://static.publicknowledge.org/pdf/HR-4569-DTCSA-Analog-Hole.pdf">HR 4569, a bill "to require certain analog conversion devices to preserve digital content security measures"—in other words, to mandate that electronic devices and software manufactured after a yet-to-be-specified date respond to a copy protection system or watermark embedded in a video signal and pass that along when converting the signal to analog or vice versa. It also mandates copy protection for analog signals. This is referred to as "plugging the analog hole," since analog signals, even those converted from protected high-definition digital sources, are currently "in the clear" or open for copying. (Standard-definition signals can be protected by systems like Macrovision, but no such protection exists for high-definition signals.)

ShoreView Industries, Inc. has acquired MartinLogan Ltd., the Lawrence, KS–based manufacturer best known for its line of high-end electrostatic loudspeakers. Transaction terms have not been disclosed.

It has now been over a month since Mark Russinovich broke the story about Sony BMG's DRM software that installed root kit code onto consumers' hard drives—exposing infected computers to malware intrusions and reporting back to Sony's servers via spyware installed without consumers' knowledge or consent. Rather than growing stale, however, the story just keeps going and going as new details come to light almost every day.

Nagra USA: The Kudelski Group has announced that Nagra USA, Inc. has appointed John R. Quick of Tempo Sales & Marketing its national sales manager for the United States. Quick was formerly national sales manager for Aerial Acoustics and has experience in high-end A/V sales, system engineering, project management, and control systems integration.