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Last week, Xing">http://www.xingtech.com">Xing Technology Corporation announced its sponsorship of the First">http://www.mp3.com/conference/">First Annual MP3 Summit. In a statement, the company urged music-industry executives to discuss copyright issues, technical standards, and music distribution, and to participate in developing the future of MP3.

Fiscal year 1998 will be one of diminished expectations for Harman">http://www.harman.com">Harman International Industries, Chairman Dr. Sidney Harman announced last week to assembled analysts and fund managers at a meeting in New York. He laid much of the blame on the continuing economic slump in Asia.

Digital radio company American">http://www.worldspace.com/">American Mobile Radio Corporation announced last Wednesday that it has exercised a $52.9 million option to upgrade its satellites. The move will potentially double the channel capacity of AMRC's nationwide satellite-direct audio radio service (SDARS), scheduled for the year 2000.

The "world's largest bookstore" may be on its way to becoming one of the biggest music stores, too. Two weeks ago, Amazon.comhttp://www.amazon.com">Amazon.com; began a big push into CD retailing, more than doubling the number of its musical offerings to over 100,000 titles. (Competitor CDnowhttp://www.cdnow.com">CDnow; offers over 500,000 titles.) Visitors to the Amazon website can now click on a tab that will take them to a new music site, where they can listen to audio previews and read reviews, reprints of articles on bands and musicians, and music-industry news.

With the plethora of CD and DVD formats out there, it can be confusing figuring out what will work with what. Standards can help define specifications for a particular format, but often do little to guarantee compatibility between them.

From the Show:

On Wednesday evening, June 10, The">http://www.avacademy.com">The Academy Advancing High Performance Audio & Video held its 1998 Golden Note Awards at the Marina Del Rey Ritz-Carlton. Following an address by John Hoskins of the Advantage Performance Group, a sales consulting firm, the amiable awards ceremony was MC'd by Paradigm's own stand-up comedian, Rob Sample. AAHPAV's ceaselessly energetic Chairperson Sue Regan assisted in the presentations, as did Academy President Joe Picirilli. And the hard-working winners (drum roll, please) are . . .