News

In an aggressive move into the used audio equipment market, New York retailer Harvey">http://www.harveyonline.com">Harvey Electronics announced last week that the company will begin to sell used audio products and special purchases of new merchandise on eBayhttp://www.ebay.com">eBay;, an online auction site, beginning June 1, 1999. The company also recently announced that it will sell merchandise through other website partnerships.

On May 8, Harvey Electronics, with 9 stores in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, announced that it would acquire the Myer-Emco chain's 10 stores in Washington and Maryland. Both companies are consistently ranked among the top "hybrid" retail operations, meaning they have retail locations and emphasize custom A/V installation services. The new company will be called Harvey Electronics, but tri-state area stores will continue to be called Harvey and DC area stores will continue to be identified as Myer-Emco.

HD DVDs and Blu-Ray discs came to market with a digital rights management (DRM) content encryption system called Advanced">http://www.aacsla.com/home">Advanced Access Content System (AACS). Supposedly, AACS was intended to permit greater flexibility than conventional DVD's Content Scrambling System (CSS) DRM, since it was touted as allowing purchasers, say, to load DVDs onto their media servers or burn downloaded HD purchases to disc.

Last week, eight consumer-electronics manufacturers announced the formal establishment of the Home">http://www.havi.org">Home Audio Video Interoperability Organization (HAVi) to promote the development of products based on the the HAVi 1.0 final specification, scheduled for completion in December 1999. (An evaluation version of the HAVi 1.0 final spec can be downloaded from the HAVi website.) The HAVi Organization was founded by Grundig, Hitachi, Matsushita, Philips, Sharp, Sony, Thomson, and Toshiba, which have been working together for over two years to develop a specification to permit interoperability among networking digital home entertainment products.

There's traditional AM and FM radio, there's XM and Sirius satellite radio, and there are various cable and satellite dish "radio" music services. And finally, there's HD Radio.

What initially took form in college dorm rooms and computer geeks' homes only a few short years back looks ready to break into the mainstream audio market this year. Hard-disk–based audio systems are becoming more common as both consumer electronics and computer manufacturers rush to bring">http://www.stereophile.com/news/11185/">bring products to market.

HDCD and Pacific">http://www.hdcd.com">Pacific Microsonics appear to be on a roll these days. The HDCD process, developed to coerce 20-bit performance out of the 16-bit CD format, is gaining several new licensees and is also appearing in more devices, as evidenced by several recent announcements. The company is also looking ahead to future DVD formats with an agreement intended to couple HDCD benefits with higher sampling rates.