LATEST ADDITIONS

In what surely must be the worst-case scenario for digital rights management, Google has informed purchasers of its video downloads that they will no longer play. They are not merely copy-protected, they are unplayable under any circumstances.

Sharp launched a handsome new line of thin, lightweight LCD flat panel AQUOS HDTVs at a press event held Tuesday August 14th, 2007 at New York's The Weather Room at Top of the Rock. Sharp's Bob Scaglione introduced the new, four model 1080p space-saving D64U line, telling members of the press that the space-saving, stylish looking new sets, which feature bezels that are 25% thinner and weigh 20% less than previous models, are also the thinnest Aquos models Sharp has ever produced, measuring just 3 3/4" deep.

Last week I greeted the somewhat tardy arrival of Blu-ray and HD DVD to my rack. Happy happy joy joy, as Ren & Stimpy would say, but what to do about my reference receiver? My beloved Rotel RSX-1065 (and its seven-channel equivalent, the 1067) has no HDMI inputs. And regrettably, Rotel tells me it has no immediate plans to update its receiver line for HDMI. That means there's no way to get the new surround codecs into the receiver by a digital path at full resolution. As the magazine's audio editor, I am more than eager to hear lossless Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. I'd also like to plumb the potential of the new & improved lossy formats, Dolby Digital Plus and DTS-HD High Resolution Audio. The only way to get them into the Rotel at full resolution was via the receiver's 5.1-channel analog inputs, relying on the player's built-in surround decoder. That took care of the Pioneer BDP-HD1 Blu-ray player, and I threw in a digital coaxial connection to continue feeding the receiver's old-style Dolby Digital and DTS decoders. But even if I'd been willing to swap six analog cables from player to player, the Toshiba HD-A2 HD DVD player has no 5.1 analog-outs! I had to settle for the digital optical interface, which handles the new codecs at reduced resolution as a backward-compatibility move. This introduced me to a quirk of Toshiba's HD DVD players, which is that they convert Dolby Digital Plus into PCM and then transcode it into DTS. Thus the optical connection lights up the DTS indicator on my receiver even when I'm not playing a DTS soundtrack. Having at least temporarily licked my connectivity problems, I set about upgrading the firmware in both players. Details next time.

As a follow-up to Ken Pohlmann's story on Apple and EMI vs. DRM: The Universal Music Group has announced that it, too, will begin selling its catalog online without Digital Rights Management. However, Universal won't be making its entire catalog...