Jon Iverson

The English flat-panel speaker company New Transducers Ltd., also known as NXT, recently announced a new transparent loudspeaker technology called SoundVu that the company says will enable television and computer screens to function simultaneously as loudspeakers.

Two elements that keep the audio business interesting are the new companies and technologies arriving almost every week (see also BW's story). Some stick around for years, while others fade away between hi-fi shows. But amid the incessant change are a handful of characters who stay with it, continually evolving with the industry and reinventing themselves with each twist and turn.

After a particularly tough year, Carver Corporation announced last week that it has executed an agreement with founder Bob Carver, who had sold his interest in the company and then started up privately held Sunfire Corporation (see previous story). The new agreement places Sunfire in charge of the development, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution, under the Carver brand name, of a new line of home and car products that will incorporate "new" technologies. The agreement also establishes a new manufacturer's representative and independent dealer network to rebuild Carver Corporation, and for Bob Carver to assume full operational control of the company.

MP3 audio files have quickly become the dominant format for downloading music over the Internet, and have just as quickly raised the ire of music labels and artists looking to protect their musical assets. For example, a petition signed by nearly 400 European recording artists (including Mstislav Rostropovich and Barbara Hendricks) was handed to the European Parliament last Tuesday by French composer Jean-Michel Jarre to protest lax copyright protections exacerbated by digital technology. The petition states, in part, "We want to use new digital technologies like the Internet to create and to deliver our music, but we will only feel confident doing so if we know that the laws are there to stop our works falling victim to pirates."