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<i>Stereophile</i> hatches a website!

Welcome to the official Stereophile website!

There are a lot of great audio websites out there, and we hope Stereophile will contribute to making the internet a rich resource for audiophiles.

Realizing that no website is ever in a final state, we will be continually evolving this online publication. Critical to the success of this website will be your feedback and ideas. Send comments anytime to Jon Iverson, or participate in one of our interactive forums.

For our online readers each week, there will be a collection of important news items of particular interest to…

Tweeter to Acquire DOW Stereo/Video

Last week, Tweeter Home Entertainment Group, Inc. announced that the company has reached an agreement in principle to acquire DOW Stereo/Video, Inc., located in San Diego, California. DOW is a nine-store specialty consumer-electronics retailer with sales of approximately $38 million, and has been in business in the San Diego market for over 30 years. The transaction is expected to be completed on or about July 1, 1999. Tweeter says it will pay approximately $5.5 million for the company excluding acquisition costs, and has the option of paying approximately $500,000 of the purchase price in…

Threshold Corporation Plans Financial Reorganization

Threshold Corporation, long known as one of the original high-end audio equipment pioneers, is discussing plans to restructure the company to meet new market conditions. Threshold, based in Camarillo, California, manufactures high-end audio amplifiers, preamplifiers, and digital products under the Threshold, FortT, and PS Audio product lines. (PS Audio, of which Threshold Corp. is the majority owner, is currently a separate corporation.)

According to Chris English, Sales Manager for and shareholder in Threshold Corp., "We are indeed going through some financial and managerial…

Consumer Electronics Not Threatened by Y2K, says CEMA

In the children's fable, Chicken Little, the archetypal alarmist, induced fear and panic in his community by running amok and shouting, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" The hysterical fowl has many relatives among journalists and economists, who regularly issue dire warnings about the forthcoming Year 2000 problem.

Y2K, as it is commonly known, is a computer glitch that will primarily affect older computer systems when the clock strikes midnight on December 31, 1999. These systems, with only two digits for the date ("99" instead of "1999"), will interpret 00 as 1900 instead of the…

Digital Music Management

There's no question that the computer is at the heart of the recorded music experience for many people, but saving, sorting, and accessing digital music files can be a real chore. Now two Los Angeles technology companies have combined forces to create what they are calling "one-click" digital music management.

The two, Savage Beast Technologies and Auditude, have created a new music management software called Celestial Home Jukebox, which will "enable consumers to identify and organize all of their digital music files, automatically build playlists, and receive personalized recommendations…

California to Vet Music Biz Books

Questionable accounting practices were at the heart of the collapse of energy conglomerate Enron and telecommunications giant WorldCom. Apparently, they are also rampant in the music industry—or at least pervasive enough to command the attention of California state legislators, who have scheduled a second hearing to examine the situation.

Tentatively planned to be held in Los Angeles on September 24, the hearing would continue a probe begun in late July. At the first hearing, representatives of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) left without using their allotted time to…

Maybe The Kids Are Allright

Remember FM radio's effect on college campuses years ago? Free music, usually without commercials (college stations are largely non-profit), and very flexible playlists made or broke new bands. Fast-forward to 2000. Students now spend most of their time downloading MP3 files for free over the Internet for playback on their computers. As before, new artists often benefit from this phenomena, but record companies are increasingly seeing the students as pirates rather than consumers.

But maybe those music-loving kids are not so bad after all. According to a recent survey conducted by…

Closing the Analog Hole

On December 16, Congressmen James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and John Conyers (D-MI) introduced HR 4569, a bill "to require certain analog conversion devices to preserve digital content security measures"—in other words, to mandate that electronic devices and software manufactured after a yet-to-be-specified date respond to a copy protection system or watermark embedded in a video signal and pass that along when converting the signal to analog or vice versa. It also mandates copy protection for analog signals. This is referred to as "plugging the analog hole," since analog signals, even those…

Macrovision Beta-Testing CD Copy Protection Technology

Forget the Serial Copy Management System, music fans. Macrovision Corporation is taking CD copy prevention to the next level. The folks who made it impossible to loop your DVD player through your VCR want to make sure you can't copy new music either. On February 27, Sunnyvale, CA-based Macrovision announced that it will begin beta-testing its "Safeaudio Toolkit," a CD-audio copy-protection technology. One major record label has already completed its own testing, according to an official statement. Macrovision announced its intention to go forward with the technology late last year.

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Added to the Archives This Week

John Atkinson shuffles his feet a little and finally mutters, " . . . Convergence." He laments, "I swore I wasn't going to use the 'C' word, but when you're faced with writing about a product that smashes the boundaries between component categories as completely as the CardDeluxe does, you have little choice." JA reviews the Digital Audio Labs CardDeluxe PC soundcard and answers the pointed question: "But it's only a PC soundcard. What's the big deal?"

With Napster monopolizing the audio news, Stereophile's Jon Iverson is feeling neglected as an audiophile. In this month's "As We See…