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Following a recent announcement of "diminished expectations" for the near future (see previous">http://www.stereophile.com/news/10194/">previous story) and a shakeup of upper management---in which Consumer Group marketing honcho Tom Jacoby was put out to pasture and audio guru Floyd Toole was promoted to senior vice president of acoustic and transducer engineering---Harman">http://www.harman.com">Harman International Industries has put the finishing touches on a new 10,000-square-foot audio laboratory. At company headquarters in Northridge, CA, north of Los Angeles, the laboratory includes a 10,000-cubic-foot anechoic chamber for testing and measuring loudspeakers, and a multichannel room with computer-controlled, hydraulically operated platforms for positioning front left, center, and right speakers (a reviewer's dream!).

It's no secret that Dolby">http://www.dolby.com">Dolby Laboratories doesn't aim its audio compression technologies at the high-end consumer audio market. After all, Dolby excels at finding ways to get maximum performance out of limited-bandwidth environments such as the audio cassette, or the space alloted for 5.1-channel soundtracks on DVDs.

In a move that is likely to push record labels into the uncharted territory of direct sales, BMGhttp://www.bmg.com">BMG; has announced its intention to add in-house sales to its network of music sites. "BMG will be moving in the fall to its own fulfillment capability because of the demands of consumers," said senior vice president Scott Dinsdale at the Business Online 98 conference in San Francisco last week.

Fiscal year 1998 will be one of diminished expectations for Harman">http://www.harman.com">Harman International Industries, Chairman Dr. Sidney Harman announced last week to assembled analysts and fund managers at a meeting in New York. He laid much of the blame on the continuing economic slump in Asia.

Digital radio company American">http://www.worldspace.com/">American Mobile Radio Corporation announced last Wednesday that it has exercised a $52.9 million option to upgrade its satellites. The move will potentially double the channel capacity of AMRC's nationwide satellite-direct audio radio service (SDARS), scheduled for the year 2000.

The "world's largest bookstore" may be on its way to becoming one of the biggest music stores, too. Two weeks ago, Amazon.comhttp://www.amazon.com">Amazon.com; began a big push into CD retailing, more than doubling the number of its musical offerings to over 100,000 titles. (Competitor CDnowhttp://www.cdnow.com">CDnow; offers over 500,000 titles.) Visitors to the Amazon website can now click on a tab that will take them to a new music site, where they can listen to audio previews and read reviews, reprints of articles on bands and musicians, and music-industry news.

With the plethora of CD and DVD formats out there, it can be confusing figuring out what will work with what. Standards can help define specifications for a particular format, but often do little to guarantee compatibility between them.