February 2000&mdash;We are now comfortably past all the millennial hype, which, by New Year's Eve, really <I>had</I> risen to a nauseating fever pitch. But it's hard not to look back to the times, the places, and, most of all, to the faces and personalities that populated the last hundred years.

February 2000&mdash;We are now comfortably past all the millennial hype, which, by New Year's Eve, really <I>had</I> risen to a nauseating fever pitch. But it's hard not to look back to the times, the places, and, most of all, to the faces and personalities that populated the last hundred years.

February 2000&mdash;We are now comfortably past all the millennial hype, which, by New Year's Eve, really <I>had</I> risen to a nauseating fever pitch. But it's hard not to look back to the times, the places, and, most of all, to the faces and personalities that populated the last hundred years.

February 2000&mdash;We are now comfortably past all the millennial hype, which, by New Year's Eve, really <I>had</I> risen to a nauseating fever pitch. But it's hard not to look back to the times, the places, and, most of all, to the faces and personalities that populated the last hundred years.

February 2000&mdash;We are now comfortably past all the millennial hype, which, by New Year's Eve, really <I>had</I> risen to a nauseating fever pitch. But it's hard not to look back to the times, the places, and, most of all, to the faces and personalities that populated the last hundred years.

February 2000&mdash;We are now comfortably past all the millennial hype, which, by New Year's Eve, really <I>had</I> risen to a nauseating fever pitch. But it's hard not to look back to the times, the places, and, most of all, to the faces and personalities that populated the last hundred years.

DVD-Audio has kept a low profile since its misfired "launch" late last year (see <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10620/">previous story</A>), but has popped up again at this week's Audio Engineering Society Convention (<A HREF="http://www.aes.org">AES</A&gt;) in Paris. <A HREF="http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/">Pioneer</A&gt; is demonstrating its latest generation of universal DVD players, <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10633/">recently released in Japan</A>, using a new DVD-Audio disc, some of the contents of which were encoded using Meridian Lossless Packing (MLP) technology to enable high-resolution surround sound.

This spring, downloadable digital music from <A HREF="http://www.emigroup.com/">EMI</A&gt; may begin popping up everywhere, if a new arrangement with <A HREF="http://www.supertracks.com/">Supertracks</A&gt; goes as planned. The two companies have created what they believe is a secure system for downloading music to computers, portable players, and to CD burners at kiosks in shopping malls. The news follows by only a couple of weeks an announcement that <A HREF="http://www.warnermusic.com/">Warner Music</A> and EMI will merge their operations under the larger umbrella of AOL Time Warner.

Satellite radio got a boost toward wider market acceptance on February 16, when <A HREF="http://www.siriusradio.com/">Sirius Satellite Radio</A> and <A HREF="http://www.xmradio.com/">XM Satellite Radio</A> announced an agreement to develop a unified standard for satellite radios. The current batch of satellite receivers can pick up transmissions from one of the providers, but not both. The next generation of receivers will expand the technology's reach by enabling reception of both companies' broadcasts.