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On April 15, ASCAPhttp://www.ascap.com/">ASCAP; (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), the music performing-rights organization, and Liquid">http://www.liquidaudio.com">Liquid Audio, a developer of secure online music delivery systems, announced a strategic alliance to protect ownership of music on the Internet. According to a Liquid Audio press release, the initiative encourages, streamlines, and simplifies music-rights licensing and reporting, and will benefit website creators as well as music writers, publishers, and composers.

Everyone claims "CD-quality" sound over the Internet these days, but the reality always seems far short of that promise. As a result, work continues to develop an encoding scheme worthy of the CD-quality title. Recently we reportedhttp://www.stereophile.com/news/10133/">reported; on developments at AT&Thttp://www.att.com">AT&T; regarding the a2bhttp://www.a2bmusic.com">a2b; format, and both Liquid">http://www.liquidaudio.com">Liquid Audio and RealNetworkshttp://www.realnetworks.com">RealNetworks; compete on a weekly basis to grab headlines for their audio technology announcements.

One billion dollars in 1997---thatÆs the Consumer">http://www.cema.org">Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association's first-ever estimate of the high-end industry's factory-sales volume. The number could be as high as $1.4 billion, according to a CEMA projection for the entire industry based on sales data of a representative sample of 32 companies. The results of the survey were published March 23 on CEMA's website.

Responding to continued softness in the audio market, the Consumer">http://www.cema.org">Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association (CEMA) has finalized plans to hold its first annual Audio Industry Summit at the Westin Hotel O'Hare in Chicago, Illinois, May 29-31. CEMA audio company members will congregate in an effort to formulate strategies they believe will lead the category back to long-term prosperity and growth.

Recently, Analog">http://www.analog.com/">Analog Devices announced the worldÆs first High Definition Compatible Digital (HDCD) decoder chip with 32-bit internal precision. The ADSP-21061 SHARC programmable digital signal processor will enable HDCD decoding to be incorporated into a wide variety of consumer audio and home-theater products, according to an AD press release dated March 26. The SHARC DSP can perform up to 150 million operations per second, and includes one megabit of onboard memory, six DMA channels, and two serial ports. The highly integrated decoder is claimed to perform HDCD decoding without external memory.

On April 8, Nordic">http://www.nordicdms.com/">Nordic Entertainment Worldwide announced that it has adopted ARIS Technologies' MusiCode audio watermarking system. The Napa, California-based company operates the Downloadable Music Site, one of the Internet's most extensive music archives. MusiCode is an attempt to discourage piracy by embedding signals in recorded music, which can later be extracted for tracking the recordingÆs origin.

On April 7, Carver">http://www.carver.com">Carver Corp. announced an agreement in principle for the sale of 3 million shares of restricted Common Stock of the company to one of its preferred shareholders, Renwick Special Situations Fund, L.P., for $375,000, or $0.125 per share.