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News
Another Record-Breaking Retail Sales Quarter
Jon Iverson  |  Nov 26, 2000  |  0 comments
Retailers Ultimate Electronics, Sound Advice, Harvey Electronics and Good Guys have all reported strong sales for their most recent quarters, leading into the holiday shopping season. The only sour note was posted by Circuit City, which has stated that earnings are below expectations across all product categories.
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News
Verance Awarded Patent for Anti-Collusion Technology
Jon Iverson  |  Nov 26, 2000  |  0 comments
Last week, Verance announced that the US Patent and Trademark Office has issued them a new patent intended to prevent the disabling of a watermark on recorded content. The patent is entitled "Method and Apparatus for Preventing Removal of Embedded Information in Cover Signals." The company has recently drawn the ire of audiophiles, who claim that its watermarking methods are audible in high resolution media such as DVD-Audio recordings (see previous report).
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News
CEA Study: Shrinking Difference in Technology Use by Men, Women
Stereophile Staff  |  Nov 26, 2000  |  0 comments
When it comes to purchasing and using electronics products, the gap between men and women appears to be disappearing. That's one conclusion reached by a study conducted in early October by eBrain Market Research and published by the Consumer Electronics Association. The study, titled Women, Men & Consumer Electronics, questioned 1000 random households about their involvement with electronics technology.
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News
Added to the Archives This Week
Stereophile Staff  |  Nov 26, 2000  |  0 comments
First up, from the November, 2000 issue, is the Hovland HP-100 preamplifier. Michael Fremer writes, "While the HP-100 is Hovland's first publicly traded audio component, it is . . . the fulfillment of what's been Robert Hovland's goal all along: to bring such a product to market. Or so I was told. It's just taken 'some time to get it all right.' Given the company's history of more than 20 years, that sounds like an understatement." Fremer offers his sonic assessment.
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News
Sirius Digital Radio Satellite Launches This Week
Barry Willis  |  Nov 26, 2000  |  0 comments
A new era in radio will begin on November 30, when a rocket lifts off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan carrying a commercial digital radio transponder to a geosynchronous orbit over North America. The satellite, which belongs to Sirius Satellite Radio, will eventually beam as many as 100 stations providing "CD-quality" sound to listeners throughout the continent.
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News
Hewlett Packard Will Pay GEMA for Piracy
Barry Willis  |  Nov 26, 2000  |  0 comments
In what may be the precursor to a deluge of lawsuits against electronics manufacturers, computer giant Hewlett-Packard has agreed to pay fees to German music licensing organization GEMA for revenue supposedly lost to piracy. Hewlett-Packard was targeted by GEMA last May, because the Palo Alto, Calfornia-based company's CD burners dominate the German market, and was originally asked to pay 30 marks ($12.90) for each unit sold in Germany since February, 1998.
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Fine Tunes
Fine Tunes #29
Jonathan Scull  |  Nov 26, 2000  |  0 comments
I must share with you an e-mail from reader Gene Radice (mediphor@ptd.net), in response to my September "Fine Tunes," on avoiding slap-echo. "Your columns are so refreshing to read," it began.
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Tube Preamp Reviews
Hovland HP-100 preamplifier
Michael Fremer  |  Nov 26, 2000  |  0 comments
There's a whorish aspect to reviewing that some readers and industry critics never tire of mentioning, as if they've stumbled onto some great revelation: that we writers seem to flit from new product to new product, sometimes gushing like cracked fire hydrants over one amplifier one month, only to gush over another amp the following month.
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Hi-Rez Disc Player/Transport Reviews
Technics DVD-A10 DVD-Audio player
Jonathan Scull  |  Nov 23, 2000  |  0 comments
If you search for "DVD-A" on this website, you can get the whole confusing story of the format, which has been the subject of one of the strangest format launches of recent years: First it's on, then it's off. The watermark is audible. No, it's not. Oops, it is—back to square one. There's software, there's no software. (There's not—only one demo disc officially available in September 2000, when I wrote this review!)
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Think Pieces
Bits vs Atoms
George Reisch  |  Nov 22, 2000  |  0 comments
Metallica's Lars Ulrich and Creed's Scott Sapp don't get it. But Courtney Love understands, and so does Stereophile's Jon Iverson, who pointed out in the October issue's "As We See It" that the dispute between the RIAA and Napster is more important to audiophiles than it might seem. The Napster-MP3 phenomenon is a crack in the dike that controls music distribution. How the water seeps through that crack now will determine how it will flow when the drip turns into a trickle, the trickle into a stream, the stream into a river. Audiophiles and pop-music fans alike will be in the same boat.
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