News

DS Audio's Tetsuaki Aoyagi, known casually as Aki, was at High End Munich introducing his new DS Audio Eccentricity Detection Stabilizer ES-001 device. The next-gen (read: young) designer attended with his parents—something seldom seen at hi-fi shows. (That said, my father attended AXPONA again this year.) And families do attend the High End Munich show, perhaps more regularly than others.

Acoustic Sounds Inc. has today announced that it has launched a new high resolution download service, Acoustic Sounds Super HiRez, at www.superhirez.com

At present, the recording industry is based on a variety of analog and PCM digital audio formats, putting proponents of Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD, which is based on the Direct Stream Digital, or DSD, format) in a tough place when it comes to creating pure DSD works for showing off the format. To date, labels have had a limited number of options for creating, mixing, and mastering pure DSD projects.

Graham Nash and Frank Zappa will be DTS">http://www.dts.com">DTS Entertainment's first artists to debut in Europe on DVD-Audio, thanks to an agreement between DTSE and Cadiz Music, Ltd., a distributor in Greenwich, England. DTS Entertainment is the entertainment division of Digital Theater Systems, Inc., based in Agoura Hills, CA.

Market tests have been conducted, rumors floated, and now official word has arrived that DualDisc, a new two-sided disc format combining a CD on one side with a DVD on the other, will launch this October.

Only a few short years ago, Napster quickly took root to show the world how Internet-based audio file-trading was where music distribution's future growth might run wild. But the record labels would have none of it and just as swiftly took a legal chainsaw to Napster's trunk, laying it waste and leaving plenty of room for Kazaa and other unsanctioned services to sprout like weeds.

Earlier this month, an unambiguous and simple message went up on the Dunlavy Audio Labs web">http://www.dunlavyaudio.com/">web site: "As of November 7, 2002, Dunlavy Audio Labs, LLC has ceased operations." A phone call to the company confirms that it is indeed out of business, although Dunlavy president Keny Whitright did not return calls seeking comment.

One by one, free music sites are disappearing. On January 19, Amsterdam-based KaZaAhttp://www.kazaa.nl">KaZaA; became the latest, caving in to threats of fines in excess of $40,000 per day.

Not long after the single-disc CD player was introduced, the multidisc changer followed, with products from companies like Sonyhttp://www.sony.com">Sony; and Pioneerhttp://www.pioneerelectronics.com">Pioneer;. Shortly after the changer was introduced, it became the most popular version of the new hardware format. In the past eight years, changers have consistently outsold single-disc machines. The high-end market was characteristically slow to embrace changers, but companies like California">http://www.calaudio.com">California Audio Labs have been successful in this category with products like the CL-10, a five-disc carousel changer.

Frequently a hot topic in the hallowed pages of Stereophile, DVD-Audio will be among the agenda items at the third US DVD Conference on October 1-2, 1998, in San Francisco. Presented by the DVD">http://www.dvdforum.org/">DVD Forum, the international association working to develop universal DVD formats, the event will take place at the Grand Peninsula Ballroom at the Hyatt Regency SF Airport.