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The quest to secretly track music fans continues: Royal">http://www.philips.com">Royal Philips Electronics and Digimarchttp://www.digimarc.com">Digimarc; announced last week that they have signed a new agreement that extends the licensing of Digimarc's digital watermarking patents to include audio applications as well as a broader range of video applications.

One might assume that the mutually dependent businesses of electronics manufacturing and retailing would track each other in perfect unison. That's often true, but they can sometimes get wildly out of sync with each other. It's one of the great economic mysteries.

Start policing your employees' use of file sharing networks or we sue you. That was the threat from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to Fortune 1000 companies last week as the organizations announced the publication and distribution of a guide "to assist US companies in preventing copyright abuse on their computers and networks."

The Swedes have found a new way to kill time on those long, cold Scandinavian winter nights. On February 7, Swedish">http://www.sr.se">Swedish Radio (SR) announced that it had begun multichannel test transmissions from the Sirius 2 satellite, utilizing DTS's">http://www.dtsonline.com">DTS's Coherent Acoustics compression/ decompression algorithm. The tests are intended to run until the end of April 2003.

The continuing recession is hitting Circuit">http://www.circuitcity.com">Circuit City hard.

One area where DVD-Audio so far has an advantage over SACD is on the computer. To date there are no SACD-compatible personal computers on the consumer market, allowing the playback of a single-layer stereo or multichannel DSD format disc. One can, however, play a DVD-Audio disc on a PC using, for example, a Sound">http://www.stereophile.com/news/11454/">Sound Blaster Audigy 2 sound card.

Kalman Rubinson fires up the Sonic">http://www.stereophile.com//amplificationreviews/769/">Sonic Frontiers Line 2 line preamplifier, commenting, "I began this review grudgingly because I'd made a decision a while back to no longer pursue vacuum-tube electronics." But it's where KR ends up after months of listening that counts.