While the DVD Consortium's Working Group 4 (WG-4) is still working on the 0.9 specification for DVD-Audio, Sony and Philips have been silently carrying on work on their Super Audio CD, the consumer implementation of Sony's DSD. The Sony/Philips disc will have two layers, one carrying normal 44.1kHz, 16-bit CD information (and thus guaranteeing backwards compatibility with existing CD players), the other carrying eight channels in DSD format (two for high-quality stereo, six for surround), plus text and/or graphics.

The market for recorded music, measured by what manufacturers ship to retail and non-retail channels, experienced a decline in unit shipments and dollar value according to a <A HREF="http://www.riaa.com">Recording Industry Association of America</A> (RIAA) report released February 19. Concurrently, accounts from US record retailers and mass merchandisers indicated a banner 1997.

Last week, <A HREF="http://www.intel.com">Intel Corporation</A> announced its membership in the DVD WG-4 Audio Working Group, and its support for the proposed DVD audio specification, as the next steps in bringing next-generation consumer-quality audio to the PC platform.

On February 18, <A HREF="http://www.harman.com">Harman International Industries Inc.</A> announced that it had signed two licensing agreements with <A HREF="http://www.nxt.co.uk">New Transducers Limited</A> (NXT) relating to NXT's flat-panel loudspeaker technology.

February 20---Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazil's president, has signed into law two bills intended to rein in that nation's widespread abuse of intellectual properties and bring Brazil into compliance with worldwide copyright law. One covers software piracy; the other, authorship rights.

This week, <A HREF="http://www.burr-brown.com">Burr-Brown</A&gt; Corporation announced the PCM1733, a low-cost, CD-quality audio digital-to-analog converter (DAC) designed for high-volume, mass-market consumer audio applications.

For the second consecutive year, a film using the Nagra Digital Recorder (Nagra-D) as the location sound device has been nominated for an Oscar Award for Best Sound. The film this year is <i>L.A. Confidential</i>, which has received a total of 9 Oscar nominations. The winners will be named at the 70th Annual Academy Awards on March 23, 1998. Last year, <i>The English Patient</i>, which also used the Nagra-D, won the award for Best Sound

From <A HREF="http://www.QRSMusic.com">Music Technologies, Inc.</A> comes the announcement that the Virtuoso Violin, the world's first computer-controlled violin, debuted last week in Menlo Park, California.