PARA, the <A HREF="http://www.paralink.org/">Professional Audio-Video Retailers Association</A>, is bringing its annual management conference to the Hyatt Regency in Hilton Head, South Carolina, this week. The five-day event, running April 22-27, will focus on improving retail strategies. Representatives from more than 600 retailers, suppliers, and industry publications are expected.

One billion dollars in 1997---that&#198;s the <A HREF="http://www.cema.org">Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association</A>'s first-ever estimate of the high-end industry's factory-sales volume. The number could be as high as $1.4 billion, according to a CEMA projection for the entire industry based on sales data of a representative sample of 32 companies. The results of the survey were published March 23 on CEMA's website.

Everyone claims "CD-quality" sound over the Internet these days, but the reality always seems far short of that promise. As a result, work continues to develop an encoding scheme worthy of the CD-quality title. Recently we <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10133/">reported</A&gt; on developments at <A HREF="http://www.att.com">AT&T</A&gt; regarding the <A HREF="http://www.a2bmusic.com">a2b</A&gt; format, and both <A HREF="http://www.liquidaudio.com">Liquid Audio</A> and <A HREF="http://www.realnetworks.com">RealNetworks</A&gt; compete on a weekly basis to grab headlines for their audio technology announcements.

On April 15, <A HREF="http://www.ascap.com/">ASCAP</A&gt; (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), the music performing-rights organization, and <A HREF="http://www.liquidaudio.com">Liquid Audio</A>, a developer of secure online music delivery systems, announced a strategic alliance to protect ownership of music on the Internet. According to a Liquid Audio press release, the initiative encourages, streamlines, and simplifies music-rights licensing and reporting, and will benefit website creators as well as music writers, publishers, and composers.

On April 7, <A HREF="http://www.carver.com">Carver Corp.</A> announced an agreement in principle for the sale of 3 million shares of restricted Common Stock of the company to one of its preferred shareholders, Renwick Special Situations Fund, L.P., for $375,000, or $0.125 per share.

On April 8, <A HREF="http://www.nordicdms.com/">Nordic Entertainment Worldwide</A> announced that it has adopted ARIS Technologies' MusiCode audio watermarking system. The Napa, California-based company operates the Downloadable Music Site, one of the Internet's most extensive music archives. MusiCode is an attempt to discourage piracy by embedding signals in recorded music, which can later be extracted for tracking the recording&#198;s origin.

Recently, Sound Advice, Inc., a specialty retailer of high-end consumer electronics, announced plans to open five to six stores in Florida over the next 18 months. The company expects that two to three of the stores will be in operation by the end of this calendar year, with the balance to be opened in 1999. Sound Advice is also exploring other ideas, such as smaller-format specialty stores in upscale malls and other high-end retail locations that feature high-quality brand names.

Recently, <A HREF="http://www.analog.com/">Analog Devices</A> announced the world&#198;s first High Definition Compatible Digital (HDCD) decoder chip with 32-bit internal precision. The ADSP-21061 SHARC programmable digital signal processor will enable HDCD decoding to be incorporated into a wide variety of consumer audio and home-theater products, according to an AD press release dated March 26. The SHARC DSP can perform up to 150 million operations per second, and includes one megabit of onboard memory, six DMA channels, and two serial ports. The highly integrated decoder is claimed to perform HDCD decoding without external memory.

"Digital audio quality at analog prices." That&#198;s how <A HREF="http://www.cirrus.com/">Cirrus Logic</A>'s Crystal Semiconductor division introduced a chip that may bring a new level of audio performance to a much wider audience. On April 6, Crystal announced its CS4334, an 8-pin, small-outline D/A converter. The 24-bit CS4334 will support sampling rates of up to 96kHz, and is being marketed as a low-cost, high-quality solution for computer, automotive, and portable audio applications, as well as DVD systems and set-top converter boxes. Crystal claims the new chip is the industry&#198;s smallest delta-sigma DAC.