LATEST ADDITIONS

In his review of the Toshiba SD-9200 DVD-Audio player, Chip Stern asks the question "In a rollout of new technologies more or less driven by the expectations of the home-theater crowd, what's in it for us music-lovers?" Stern uncovers the answer and then some, while Kal Rubinson explores the player's surround-music performance.

Breaking news at the 2001 CEDIA Expo, held this past weekend in Indianapolis, IN, was that Harry Pearson, founder and editor of bimonthly high-end audio magazine The Absolute Sound, has apparently been moved to one side. According to TAS publisher Mark Fisher, with whom I spoke briefly Sunday morning on the Show floor, the day-to-day editing of the magazine will become the responsibility of erstwhile Stereophile consulting technical editor Robert Harley.

My dogs were killing me. It was the end of the second day of the 1985 Summer Consumer Electronics Show, which I was visiting on behalf of English magazine Hi-Fi News & Record Review. I had been dutifully tramping the capacious corridors of Chicago's McCormick Center and the rooms of the (now demolished) McCormick Inn, looking for signs of musical life amid the huge promotion for the 8mm tape format, which was being heavily touted at CES as the future of both video and audio (!) reproduction. Even trade-paper headlines shouting "Audio: Not Just Video Peripheral!" failed to lift my spirits as I took the shuttle bus over to the Americana Congress hotel on South Michigan, where most of the high-end audio companies were hanging out.

The Super Audio CD has won the endorsement of two more major record labels, according to press releases issued the last week of August. The announcements followed by only a few days one by Universal Music Group that it would begin producing the high-resolution recordings for mass distribution.