Jon Iverson

<A HREF="http://www.dolby.com">Dolby Laboratories</A> was demonstrating its new <A HREF="http://www.aac-audio.com">Advanced Audio Coding</A> (AAC) consumer encoder, which the company says complements its professional AAC encoder, at this year's New York AES Convention. Dolby says it will license the encoder to enable "high-quality AAC encoding" for CD-rippers, hard disk&ndash;based jukebox products, Internet-based music distribution systems, portable players, and other digital audio products aimed at the consumer market.

Sam Tellig loves 'em and consistently sings their high-quality/low-buck praises as a cheapskate favorite ($6.99 per CD!). And now, classical music label <A HREF="http://www.naxos.com">Naxos of America</A> is blazing new paths with its announcement last week that it and <A HREF="http://www.liquidaudio.com">Liquid Audio</A> have inked an agreement to digitally distribute downloads of selected Naxos recordings to leading retail and music web sites in the Liquid Music Network.

Record label attempts at restricting the potential uses of their CDs have hit another bump in the antipiracy road. Music label BMG had announced earlier this year that it would try to find ways to restrict its CDs, in an effort to stem piracy and the trading of MP3 files. But those plans appear to have backfired, so far.

They don't turn over quite as fast as computer equipment, but mass-market audio component product cycles typically last about a year, until the next Consumer Electronics Show comes around. High-end audio products, however, enjoy much longer life spans&mdash;sometimes stretching to several years.

<A HREF="http://www.ti.com">Texas Instruments</A> says it is on a quest to provide "high-performance audio solutions" for the home entertainment market. To prove it, last week the company announced its first stereo analog-to-digital converters supporting the Direct Stream Digital (DSD) specification and the Super Audio CD format (SACD).

Most folks have enough room in their homes (some college students excepted) to easily place 100W amplifiers without regard to size or heat. But in the car, high-powered amps have always been relegated to the trunk or under a seat, often requiring creative solutions for anything with real heft.

Hard-disk&ndash;based audio systems having been gaining traction in recent months, with a half-dozen consumer electronics companies announcing or selling products. These new components model what savvy computer users have been hacking together for years&mdash;a software-controlled music library based on hundreds or thousands of CD or MP3 files stored on a hard disk.