Because of their efficiency, digital amplifiers have long been favored by engineers for portable applications. They haven't made big inroads in the audiophile market yet, but that situation may be changing. Santa Clara, CA–based Tripath Technology Inc.…
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Analog audio electronics are approaching "maturity," a state eventually achieved by most technologies, in which almost all the great discoveries have been made and progress becomes a process of increasingly arcane refinements. Digital audio is in no such danger, as evidenced by three new product announcements made the first week of April.
Sony BMG has agreed to settle a NY-based group action lawsuit triggered by the company's use of two different digital rights management (DRM) technologies. Click here to download a .pdf version of the 42-page Motion and Memorandum of Law in Support of Plaintiff's Application for Preliminary Approval of Class Action Settlement.
The settlement applies to CDs protected by Sony's XCP and MediaMax technologies and offers inducements to consumers to get them to accept the settlement. Sony agrees to supply consumers who purchased any of the DRM-compromised CDs with DRM-free copies of the discs, as…
Each month Sony Corporation announces what seems to be an even more drastic cure for its lingering financial malaise. On Tuesday, October 28, the Japanese industrial giant announced that it would reduce its workforce by approximately 13% over the next three years, cutting some 20,000 workers from its payroll, 7000 of them in Japan.
Sony will also seek to improve administrative efficiency by combining redundant or overlapping jobs, according to an announcement from Tokyo headquarters. The corporation employs about 154,500 people worldwide. In mid-October, Sony posted a 25% drop in net…
Can pirate chasers attend to business while accusing each other of piracy? Digimarc and Verance Corporation, two competitors in the digital watermarking race, have been swapping accusations over patent infringements.
On Wednesday, May 2, Tualatin, OR–based Digimarc was granted 28 patent applications for digital audio watermarking technologies that it had filed for between 1993 and 1995. The US Patent Office issued a "Notice of Allowance" approving Digimarc's patent claims, and on the same day informed the company that 74 of the 94 claims made in Digimarc's US Patents #5,636,292 and 5,850,…
On March 12, Energy Conversion Devices, Inc. announced that Sony Corporation has expanded its royalty-bearing license under ECD's proprietary phase-change rewritable optical-memory technology to include advanced technology for use in rewritable CD and DVD optical-memory products. Phase-change technology, invented by ECD, is used in PD and CD-RW rewritable optical-memory discs.
Stanford R. Ovshinsky, President and CEO of ECD, noted the significance of the announcement, saying, "ECD is proud to continue and expand its long association with Sony, a leader in this field. Technology licensed…
See it, hear it. That is the essence of an engineering project underway at the University of Applied Sciences in Fribourg, Switzerland—one that needs the assistance of a highly qualified PhD student.
The position is intended for an "enthusiastic and open-minded graduate," who will participate in "Sound Extraction from Images of Disc Records," a "VisualAudio" research project. The student chosen for the project will join the "GIRAF group" in the Computer Science Department under the guidance of Professor Rolf Ingold of the University of Fribourg, the degree-granting institution.
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Does the SLP in the Cary SLP-98P tube preamplifier's name stand for "sweet little preamplifier"? Art Dudley sets out to determine if Cary's latest version in the SLP preamp series lives up to the moniker.
Next, Jonathan Scull takes a turn with the Cary CAD-280SA V12 power amplifier, describing it as "a handsome amp, and smaller than its name might lead you to think. In fact, it's an interesting combination of the neat'n'petite and pure flamboyance."
To open his review of the Theta Digital Generation VIII D/A converter, Kal Rubinson notes, "We audiophiles are ever hopeful that, however…
The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) is reporting that sales of DVD-Video players also capable of playing high-resolution audio formats have taken off this year, compared to 2002. According to CEA market research, manufacturers shipped 148,000 DVD-A and 100,000 SACD players to retailers through May of this year.
But format success may take time. If history is any judge, the CEA's Sean Wargo says, we could see the majority of consumers enjoying high-rez audio by the year 2015, "with an even more rapid acceptance of the new audio technologies across the next decade and really driving…
Using a personal computer as an audio component has certainly gained ground with gearheads in the last several years, and many new products, such as media servers, blur the line between a traditional component and a PC. At the same time, the general public is still resisting the idea of booting up their stereos or TVs.
The computer industry, however, would like to find a foothold in everyone's living room, and Intel has just announced a new set of media technologies and standards aimed at lending a hand: Viiv (sounds like "five" and I'll bet someone got at least $30k to come up with it).…
Few music lovers who grew up in the 1950s and '60s could have failed to be influenced by torch singer Peggy Lee, who died of heart failure at her Bel Air home on Monday, January 21. Lee was 81 and had been in ill health for several years.
Like Dave Brubeck's "Take Five," her great classic recording of "Fever" was one of those spare, elegant tunes that formed the musical zeitgeist for a whole generation. They were songs that seemed to be everywhere in the sixties—utterly cool, with an adult sophistication we could only dream of acquiring. "Fever" was as incurable as malaria. Once you had…