News

In his second installment of "Fine">http://www.stereophile.com//finetunes/171/">Fine Tunes," Jonathan Scull writes: "I met a chap the other day whose wife said to me, 'Oh, you suffer from the same audiophile disease.' I hastened to inform her that I am the disease." But J-10 is also the cure, as he proves in this ode to building the perfect listening room.

Last week, eight consumer-electronics manufacturers announced the formal establishment of the Home">http://www.havi.org">Home Audio Video Interoperability Organization (HAVi) to promote the development of products based on the the HAVi 1.0 final specification, scheduled for completion in December 1999. (An evaluation version of the HAVi 1.0 final spec can be downloaded from the HAVi website.) The HAVi Organization was founded by Grundig, Hitachi, Matsushita, Philips, Sharp, Sony, Thomson, and Toshiba, which have been working together for over two years to develop a specification to permit interoperability among networking digital home entertainment products.

On November 16, Technics and Panasonic presented their DVD-Audio">http://webevents.broadcast.com/dvdaudio/frames.html">DVD-Audio Q&A Forum to answer questions online about the new high-end audio format, players, and software. After introductions and an opening orientation about DVD-Audio, the first "questions" appeared, canned, as the panelists read "answers" from their notes. Still, some interesting information came to light.

Historically, audio has not received a lot of attention from the computer industry. That long tradition may be ending, judging by a couple of new technologies that debuted at COMDEX in mid-November. COMDEX is the year's biggest computer-industry bash, held in Las Vegas two months prior to the Consumer Electronics Show.

One of the more popular monthly columns in Stereophile these days is Jonathan Scull's "Fine Tunes." To keep our online readers fit and tweaked, we are going to be adding Scull's columns to the online Archives section on a weekly basis, starting with the first column he wrote for the magazine, back in July 1998: "Fine">http://www.stereophile.com//finetunes/169/">Fine Tunes #1." "I think I just got 2000 bucks' worth of difference," writes a reader about the value of the advice contained in J-10's first installment.

Feeling the need to hook your audio system directly into a website for music files? Last week, Sony">http://www.sony.co.jp">Sony Corporation and Sun">http://www.sun.com">Sun Microsystems announced plans to further collaborate to provide digital consumer-electronics appliances with direct access to Internet-based content and services. The companies say that the first phase of this cooperation will involve the development of home gateway software, running on appliances such as set-top boxes (connected to a home entertainment system), that will support a combination of home networking and network server technologies.

Need proof that baby boomers and their attendant interests are having an effect on the frontiers of computer research? Look no further than Triumph PC Online's announcement that it has introduced The">http://www.triumphpc.com/john-lennon">The John Lennon Artificial Intelligence Project (JLAIP), the first AI-based clone of the late Beatle.  The project, initially titled The Plastic Digital Karma Project, has been under development for two years.