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On June 17, Carlton">http://www.carltonplc.co.uk/">Carlton Communications, owner of Technicolor, announced that it has entered into a merger agreement to acquire Nimbus">http://www.nimbuscd.com/">Nimbus CD International, one of the world's largest independent manufacturers of optical discs, including CD-Audio, DVD, DVD-ROM, and CD-ROM.

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.

From the Show:

On Wednesday evening, June 10, The">http://www.avacademy.com">The Academy Advancing High Performance Audio & Video held its 1998 Golden Note Awards at the Marina Del Rey Ritz-Carlton. Following an address by John Hoskins of the Advantage Performance Group, a sales consulting firm, the amiable awards ceremony was MC'd by Paradigm's own stand-up comedian, Rob Sample. AAHPAV's ceaselessly energetic Chairperson Sue Regan assisted in the presentations, as did Academy President Joe Picirilli. And the hard-working winners (drum roll, please) are . . .

Both Sonic">http://www.sonicfrontiers.com/">Sonic Frontiers Inc. and The Lenbrook Group of Ontario, Canada stated June 5th that they will not be proceeding with a deal announced earlierhttp://www.stereophile.com/news/10129/">earlier;.

On June 7, http://www.cdnow.com"> CDnow, the world's top online music retailer, announced that it had acquired superSonicBOOMhttp://www.supersonicboom.com">superSonicBOOM;, an Internet custom-compilation disc business. The acquisition gives CDnow the ability to offer its customers custom discs as well as catalog product, said Jason Olim, CDnow President and CEO.