Overall factory sales are expected to hit $80 billion this year, an increase of more than 5% over 1998's figures, with significant leaps in home information systems, electronic games, and mobile electronics. The…
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This will be a huge year for the electronics industry, insiders are saying in the wake of the just-finished 1999 Consumer Electronics Show. This one "surpassed anything we've seen before," said Gary Shapiro, the president of the Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association, in a post-Show statement. "Our industry is driving the technologies that will define the digital age."
Media servers are one of the hottest trends in home entertainment, as mentioned by Jon Iverson last week.
Emeryville , CA–based Meda Systems, Inc. is among the companies on the leading edge of this technological frontier. On September 10, Meda introduced four new models of its Bravo and Bravado music servers, using new software developed for multizone applications.
Launched at this year's Custom Electronics Design and Installation Association (CEDIA) show in Indianapolis, the full-featured Bravo 16 and Bravo 20 music servers are intended for large homes with many rooms and listening…
In an era when music as instant entertainment enjoys increasing dominance over music as art, cellular phones have emerged as the latest purveyor of music on demand. Issues of sound quality mean little when the goal is to accumulate more and more files at an ever-accelerating pace and have ever easier access to those files.
On September 7, Apple, Motorola, and Cingular Wireless (currently serving close to 52 million US customers) introduced the first iTunes-equipped mobile phone. The Motorola ROKR enables owners to transfer up to 100 favorite songs from their computer's iTunes jukebox. The…
Electronics dealers may have a great autumn if they load up on dual-well CD recorders and DVD carousel changers, two of the hottest audio fashion items. Major manufacturers like Kenwood, Onkyo, Denon,, and Harman/Kardon have all announced plans to deliver recorders and DVD changers by October, in time for the holiday season.
The growing popularity of DVD has induced many companies to remodel their CD carousel changers—long one of the best-selling categories in consumer audio—into DVD machines. Yamaha and Sony already have DVD changers on the market, and Onkyo dealers should soon have a 6-…
Citing the desire to take advantage of the power of sharing audio files over the Internet, one of the larger independent record labels, TVT Records, announced last week that it has withdrawn its copyright claims against the file-sharing company Napster. TVT said that the basis for its decision to end the lawsuit and provide its support to Napster is "the new service Napster is evolving under the strategic alliance it recently announced with Bertelsmann AG." TVT points out that, since Bertelsmann is still technically a party to litigation with Napster, it becomes the first record label to…
Chicago's Maxwell Street district is considered by many to be the birthplace of Chicago blues. But the old neighborhood is in danger of permanently losing some of its historic buildings, thanks to expansion plans by the University of Illinois at Chicago. The potential loss of the neighborhood has sparked protests by a coalition of blues musicians, including a hunger strike by 69-year-old APO Records artist Jimmie Lee Robinson.
Robinson began his fast Friday, August 18, to draw attention to threats posed by the expansion of the university's south campus into the area. The expansion will…
Feeling the need to hook your audio system directly into a website for music files? Last week, Sony Corporation and Sun Microsystems announced plans to further collaborate to provide digital consumer-electronics appliances with direct access to Internet-based content and services. The companies say that the first phase of this cooperation will involve the development of home gateway software, running on appliances such as set-top boxes (connected to a home entertainment system), that will support a combination of home networking and network server technologies.
Specific technologies to be…
It has now been over a month since Mark Russinovich broke the story about Sony BMG's DRM software that installed root kit code onto consumers' hard drives—exposing infected computers to malware intrusions and reporting back to Sony's servers via spyware installed without consumers' knowledge or consent. Rather than growing stale, however, the story just keeps going and going as new details come to light almost every day.
This week brought news that New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer, like Texas AG Greg Abbott, is unhappy about the company's XCP "copy protection." Abbott has…
Author and television producer Howard J. Blumenthal has completed his Jazz and World Music CD Listener's Guides, the first two volumes in a four-volume series. The publications include brief biographies of the top artists in each genre, arranged alphabetically, and hundreds of short reviews of the discs the author considers essential.
"Only the best CDs are included---if a CD is not worth owning, it's not included in the book," Blumenthal states on his Web site, where viewers can read approximately thirty sample reviews. The $14.95 guidebooks are intended to help music lovers build…
Otis Blackwell, the prolific songwriter who helped propel the careers of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, died Wednesday, May 9 in Nashville. The cause of death was an apparent heart attack, according to a spokesman for St. Thomas Hospital. Blackwell was 70.
He had been in the St. Thomas emergency room several times recently, the Nashville Tennessean reported. Blackwell had been in ill health since suffering a debilitating stroke in 1991, the year after he moved to Nashville to establish a new record label with Col. Tom Parker, Elvis Presley's former manager.
Blackwell is…