News

For all of the audiophiles who lament that the industry is simply preaching to the converted, Harman International's Mark Levinson® brand has a response: Wait'll you get a load of this.

This is the time of year we are generally inundated with press releases announcing new home theater products that debuted at CEDIA Expo last week (and as audionerds, er 'philes, we are fascinated, of course). However, this year we also received word of some interesting audio products from two of the most consistently innovative high-end audio companies, Meridian and Classé.

Mentioning the new Stereophilehttp://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias">Stereophile; blog to folks this past week, I usually got two questions. First, "Cool, what will it be about?" Then, "What, in fact, is a blog?"

The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) maintains a websitehttp://www.eff.org">website; that we have found invaluable for keeping up with news about technological restrictions to information and fair use. Last week, we were directed to the EFF's new User's">http://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/guide/">User's Guide to DRM in Online Music, which we recommend to everyone still undecided about buying into one of the online providers.

Last June, Sennheiser, a multinational manufacturer of microphones, headphones, and wireless technology products, celebrated its 60th anniversary. The company was founded as Wennebostel Laboratories (Labor W) in 1945 by Dr. Fritz Sennheiser and seven other employees of the Institute for Radio Frequency Engineering and Electroacoustics at Hanover Technical University. At the time, as Dr. Sennheiser explained when I visited the company's Wennebostel facility 10 years ago, German radio engineers were prohibited by the occupying Allied forces from constructing communications equipment, so he and his crew needed to find something else they could do. In addition, supply shortages severely restricted the scope of what they might manufacture. Sennheiser determined that they could build test instruments such as millivolt meters from the parts they were able to recover from the Institute and the Allies. Seimens' Hanover branch bought the first samples and the startup company began to supply that firm with more and more complex products.

Linear buys Sunfire: Following its acquisition">http://www.stereophile.com/news/082905industry">acquisition of Imerge and Nileshttp://www.stereophile.com/news/072505linear">Niles;, Linear">http:www.linearcorp.com">Linear, LLC, a division of Nortek">http:www.nortek-inc.com">Nortek, Inc. has acquired Sunfire">http:www.sunfire.com">Sunfire Corporation, manufacturer of high-end amplifiers and speakers. No details of the deal were disclosed, other than to say that Bob Carver "will remain with Sunfire."

Norway's one-stop hacking expert, Jon Lech Johansen, has now reverse-engineered the encryption coding in Windows Media Player that prevents .NSC files from being accessed by users of other platforms.Geek-to-nerd translation: An .NSC file carries information about a media stream, including the port name and file address of the stream server. When Media Player opens the file, it decodes this information and connects to the stream server the code specifies. Johansen doesn't believe there's a rational reason to encrypt this information since, upon opening the stream, the information is usually displayed by the network utility running the stream anyway. Johansen reportedly said that his hack will make WMP streams available to users of open source streaming media players, such as VideoLAN Client (VLC).