It's been an up-and-down week for consumer-electronics companies, as revealed by recent earnings reports surfacing around the globe. First, the bad news: <A HREF="http://www.sony.com">Sony</A&gt; reports that its profits fell 32% in the latest fiscal year, and cites the strong yen for depressing the value of the consumer-electronics and entertainment company's overseas earnings.

The roller-coaster fortunes of <A HREF="http://www.mp3.com/">MP3.com</A&gt; took a downturn April 28, when US district judge Jed S. Rakoff found in favor of the <A HREF="http://www.riaa.com/">Recording Industry Association of America</A> in its copyright-violation suit against Internet music site MP3.com. Investors in the once&ndash;high-flying startup immediately began unloading shares of the company's stock, which had dropped 40% by the end of the trading day.

In hopes of stoking the multichannel DVD-Audio engine, <A HREF="http://www.burrbrown.com">Burr-Brown</A&gt; announced last week the PCM1604 audio digital-to-analog converter, which they describe as a high-performance, 6-channel audio DAC featuring 24-bit capability and 192kHz sampling, for use in a "wide variety of multichannel audio applications."

Jonathan Scull thinks he has uncoverd <I>the</I> hot audiophile topic for the new millennium&mdash;e-commerce. He lays out the situation in <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//finetunes/224/">"Fine Tunes" #19</A>. Find out what various manufacturers are up to, and why.

The numbers are looking better for <A HREF="http://www.mp3.com/">MP3.com</A&gt;, the music-archiving site under <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10657/">attack</A&gt; by the Recording Industries Association of America and its <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10708/">allies</A&gt;. Despite the legal pressure, MP3.com has seen its revenues surge as the popularity of downloadable music continues to grow. On April 20, the San Diego&ndash;based company reported that its revenue increased to $17.5 million for the first quarter of 2000 compared to $666,000 for the same period a year earlier. MP3.com now has 10 million registered users, according to CEO Michael Robertson.

The world's two largest and most active music clubs may become one if preliminary talks between their parent companies bear fruit. <A HREF="http://www.timewarner.com/">Time Warner Inc.</A> and Germany's <A HREF="http://www.bertelsmann.de">Bertelsmann AG</A> have conducted discussions with that outcome in mind, according to several reports appearing in late April.

The healthy trend for the audio market continues: the <A HREF="http://www.ce.org">Consumer Electronics Association</A> reported last week that revenues from factory shipments of audio products to dealers this February increased by 8% over last February, to a total of $542 million. "The fantastic sales in February spurred the year-to-date total for audio sales to more than $1 billion; a 6% increase over the first two months of 1999," said the CEA.