News

CDnow Teams Up with Sony, Time Warner

Stereophile Staff Jul 18, 1999 First Published: Jul 18, 1999

Internet music retailer CDnowhttp://www.cdnow.com/">CDnow; has formed a partnership with Sony">http://www.sony.com/">Sony Corporation and Time">http://www.timewarner.com/">Time Warner to build a music and video retailing behemoth. The July 13 announcement came in the wake of online bookseller Amazon.com's">http://www.amazon.com/">Amazon.com's recent move into the music market. With the backing of corporate giants Sony and Time Warner, CDnow could be able to mount a challenge to the growing presence of Amazon, which is also expanding into toy sales and consumer electronics.

News

CD Radio Announces Agreement with Alpine Electronics

Jon Iverson Jul 18, 1999 First Published: Jul 18, 1999

Last week, satellite-to-car radio broadcaster CD">http://www.cdradio.com/">CD Radio announced an agreement with mobile electronics manufacturer Alpine">http://www.alpine1.com/">Alpine Electronics for the design and development of satellite radio receivers. Under the terms of the agreement, Alpine says it will design and develop three-band (AM/FM/CD Radio) audio receivers for installation by car manufacturers. The company also plans to design and develop satellite radio receivers for sale directly to consumers in the electronics aftermarket.

News

Philips Announces New Chips for CD Players

Stereophile Staff Jul 18, 1999 First Published: Jul 18, 1999

Last week, Philips">http://www.semiconductors.com/">Philips Semiconductors 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.

News

Barnesandnoble.com Jumps into Online Music Fray

Jon Iverson Jul 11, 1999 First Published: Jul 11, 1999

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, barnesandnoble.comhttp://barnesandnoble.com">barnesandnoble.com; 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.

News

Allegro's MailZone Blocks MP3 Files

Barry Willis Jul 11, 1999 First Published: Jul 11, 1999

Last week, the Secure Digital Music Initiative announced that it would allow free MP3 downloads to co-exist with new encrypted forms of digital music transmission. Despite this, widespread concern in corporate legal departments about copyright-violation liability has prompted software developers to come up with blocking techniques to prevent pirated music from entering company "Intranets."

News

Jeff Rowland Group's Demise a Hoax

Stereophile Staff Jul 11, 1999 First Published: Jul 11, 1999

The Jeff">http://www.jeffrowland.com/">Jeff Rowland Design Group 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.

News

Holman Conducts First Public Demo of "10.2" Surround Sound

Barry Willis Jul 11, 1999 First Published: Jul 11, 1999

Since the earliest days of stereo—the first experiments with more than single-channel sound happened back in the 1930s—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.

News

More Research Heralding the Booming Online Music Age

Stereophile Staff Jul 11, 1999 First Published: Jul 11, 1999

According to a recent report released by Information Technology researchers Frost">http://www.frost.com">Frost & Sullivan, the world Internet audio market generated revenues totaling $42 million in 1998, which dwarfs the 1997 revenues by 1516%. The report predicts that this market will continue growing at a healthy rate, achieving an increase into the triple percentage digits by the end of 1999.

News

Added to the Archives This Week

Stereophile Staff Jul 11, 1999 First Published: Jul 11, 1999

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

News

Lydstrom's "Next Generation CD Player" will Handle 5000 Songs

Barry Willis Jul 04, 1999 First Published: Jul 04, 1999

If Lydstrom">http://lydstrom.com/">Lydstrom, Inc. has anything to do with it, the next hot ticket in home audio won't be just another CD player, but a musical database manager capable of organizing and playing as many as 5000 songs, from CDs or from Internet downloads. The Boston, Massachusetts-based company announced June 30 that it has licensed Lucent">http://www.lucent.com/">Lucent Technologies' Enhanced Perceptual Audio Coder (ePAC) for inclusion in a product as yet unnamed but projected to be available by Christmas 1999.