Audiophiles eager to try DVD-Audio will have to wait just a bit longer. Matsushita Industrial Electric Co. and Japan Victor Company have decided to hold back their new DVD-A players, in the wake of the widely publicized decryption of the format's copy-protection scheme by a Norwegian computer hacker. The hacker published his workaround of the encryption on the Internet late in November.
Old joke: "We lose money on every sale, but we make it up in volume." A similar concept seems to be at the heart of the free download phenomenon sweeping through the Internet music industry: give it away as a lo-rez MP3, and customers will come back to buy the CD.
The object of the audio game, as <I>Stereophile</I> founder J. Gordon Holt put it, is "to re-create original acoustic events as accurately as possible." That goal has driven engineers to extraordinary lengths, improving every link in the recording and playback chain. Most such improvements are incremental, but their cumulative effect is the sometimes astounding level of sonic realism available today from even moderately priced equipment.
Doug Sahm, of the Grammy-winning Tex-Mex group the Texas Tornados, was found dead in a motel in Taos, New Mexico on Thursday, November 18. He appeared to have died of natural causes, possibly a heart attack, Taos police said. Sahm was 58.
Historically, audio has not received a lot of attention from the computer industry. That long tradition may be ending, judging by a couple of new technologies that debuted at COMDEX in mid-November. COMDEX is the year's biggest computer-industry bash, held in Las Vegas two months prior to the Consumer Electronics Show.
People love to make their own compilation recordings. That fact helped make the cassette deck the most successful audio format of all time, and it is driving sales of CD recorders, a product category new to most consumers. As <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10533/">predicted</A> last summer, CD recorders have become one of the hottest niches in consumer audio, exceeding MiniDisc machines in total sales dollars. Sales are brisk despite the fact that CD recorders are among the priciest components on the market, ranging from $500 to $600. MiniDisc recorders for home use are priced at about $250 and up.
The Andra, <I>Stereophile</I>'s 1997 Product of the Year, will soon be back. So will the Rosa, the Fontaine, the Isabel, and the Ivy Reference—in fact, the full line of <A HREF="http://www.egglestonworks.com/">EgglestonWorks</A> loudspeakers will be shipping soon to dealers, now that the company has been rescued from extinction. EgglestonWorks had been in legal limbo for most of the year as creditors wrangled over its future.
FM stereo, introduced in 1961, was the last great leap ahead in commercial radio. That was 38 years ago, an eternity in technological time. Digital audio broadcasting (DAB) techniques are capable of overcoming many of the limitations of analog broadcasting, including multipath distortion. Such systems are already in place in Europe and Canada, so why not in the United States?
For the first time in more than 10 years, individual investors have a chance to own a piece of one of the oldest and most recognized names in the American electronics industry. As of November 1, <A HREF="http://www.rca.com/">RCA</A> officially came back on the stock market, when parent company Thomson Multimedia made a successful initial public offering of 21 million shares. The stock (NYSE: TMS) debuted at $22.62 per share and closed Friday, November 5 at $29.25.
Low-power radio is once again an issue at the <A HREF="http://www.fcc.gov/">Federal Communications Commission</A>, and this time the agency is feeling the heat not only from community activists, but from rock artists as well. Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, and the Indigo Girls are just a few of the performers who have rallied behind a proposal to license 100W-to-1000W radio stations to private citizens, according to Frank Ahrens in the October 24 edition of the <A HREF="http://www.washingtonpost.com/"><I>Washington Post</I></A>.