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With new high-end audio formats hitting the shelves and MP3 and Napster dominating the online music news, developments in the world of radio have taken a back seat lately. But two announcements this week offer a peek at where the broadcast business might be headed.

The bad news for the music industry: Teenagers bought less music last year, according to a recently released survey commissioned by the Recording">http://www.riaa.com/">Recording Industry Association of America. The good news: Middle-aged folks bought more, according to the same survey.

DVD-Audio will soon bring high-resolution multichannel sound to music lovers, but they may be dismayed by the format's several varieties and the semi-compatible hardware that will be needed to play them. That was the impression left by a lecture the last week of June at Dolby">http://www.dolby.com/">Dolby Laboratories' Presentation Studio in San Francisco.

Judging from the e-mails we get, some folks wonder why Stereophile's website continues to cover the advance of such lo-fi formats as MP3 as well as the problems encountered by companies like Napster as they tangle with the music business. But consider this: a new study reports that the market for digital music players will grow to $6.4 billion in 2005—more than 34 times 1999 shipments—which is also nearly 80% of the $8 billion reported for sales of all audio products, including portables, from last year (see previous">http://www.stereophile.com/news/10677/">previous article).

One can almost imagine how it all started: "Hey, you got a computer in my audio system." "No, you got an audio system in my computer . . . "

Back when DVD players were first released in the US, Classic">http://www.classicrecs.com/">Classic Records was among the first companies to exploit the fact that early machines, though intended for the video enthusiast, could play a 24-bit/96kHz audio recording as well as movies (see previous">http://www.stereophile.com/news/10072/">previous story). These early high-resolution discs, which Classic called DADs, were intended to hold us over until DVD-Audio (then thought to be just around the corner) would finally hit the market. More than two years later we're still waiting for DVD-A, but Classic intends to be ready when it finally appears.

Making good its intention to move heavily into the ever-expanding consumer-electronics market, Texas">http://www.ti.com/">Texas Instruments has announced that it will acquire chipmaker Burr-Brown">http://www.burrbrown.com/">Burr-Brown Corporation for $7.6 billion in stock. Burr-Brown makes some of the most highly regarded A/D and D/A converter chips on the market, many of them used in high-end audio and home-theater products.