News

While the DVD Consortium's Working Group 4 (WG-4) is still working on the 0.9 specification for DVD-Audio, Sony and Philips have been silently carrying on work on their Super Audio CD, the consumer implementation of Sony's DSD. The Sony/Philips disc will have two layers, one carrying normal 44.1kHz, 16-bit CD information (and thus guaranteeing backwards compatibility with existing CD players), the other carrying eight channels in DSD format (two for high-quality stereo, six for surround), plus text and/or graphics.

The market for recorded music, measured by what manufacturers ship to retail and non-retail channels, experienced a decline in unit shipments and dollar value according to a Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) report released February 19. Concurrently, accounts from US record retailers and mass merchandisers indicated a banner 1997.

February 20---Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazil's president, has signed into law two bills intended to rein in that nation's widespread abuse of intellectual properties and bring Brazil into compliance with worldwide copyright law. One covers software piracy; the other, authorship rights.

For the second consecutive year, a film using the Nagra Digital Recorder (Nagra-D) as the location sound device has been nominated for an Oscar Award for Best Sound. The film this year is L.A. Confidential, which has received a total of 9 Oscar nominations. The winners will be named at the 70th Annual Academy Awards on March 23, 1998. Last year, The English Patient, which also used the Nagra-D, won the award for Best Sound

Sony has recently revealed that they will be broadcasting digital audio via satellite as early as summer 1998. The planned service is the result of a deal made between Sony, Perfect TV, and Japan Sky Broadcasting Corporation (JSkyB) that is expected to close in April.

From Music Technologies, Inc. comes the announcement that the Virtuoso Violin, the world's first computer-controlled violin, debuted last week in Menlo Park, California.

Judging from the e-mail Wes Phillips has received since announcing Classic Records' 24-bit/96kHz "DADs" (DVD-Videos utilizing the two channels of 24/96 written into the video standard), audiophiles appear to be intensely curious about the new music format.