Pioneer Closing Plants - Major consumer electronics maker Pioneer Corp. ays it will cut 5% of its group workforce and close one quarter of its factories to help it recover from an earnings slump. Steep price declines in plasma displays, DVD recorders and audio equipment were partly to blame. Considered a winner in digital electronics until a year or so ago, this shows how quickly fortunes can change due to sliding prices and growing competition from low-cost rivals.
New Digital Home Music Player With HD & PDA Control - Digital Techniques has announced their Blackbird player which installs at one’s audio system and receives signals wirelessly from computers or PDAs in the home. It can hold an entire MP3 music collection, thus freeing up the hard drives in PCs, and allows feeding Internet broadcast sources thru the audio system. A choice of two high-performance sound cards are offered.
Frustration With Classical Downloads - Classical collectors comfortable with the data reduction of online sources have been left in the digital lurch by the explosion of paid music downloading. Most popular sites offer little classical among the pop, rock, rap, jazz, ambient etc. options. When classical downloads are finally searched out online they are often just the warhorses, plus the limited space for text information displays just the composer and/or name of the piece and not performers - which is important to classical listeners. iTunes is set up for pop music, dividing the music into separate tracks every few minutes. The resulting audible gaps and/or clicks are like what 8-track users once were forced to live with. There is a “join tracks” option in iTunes, but it’s not a perfect solution. Some sites are beginning to address the classical plight, among them eMusic.com, Virgin Digital and Yahoo Musicmatch.
Consumer Acceptance of HDTV - Half of all consumers plan to make their next TV purchase a HDTV set, according to a new survey from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). Dollar sales of DTV surpassed analog TV for the first time in 2003. The survey showed that 9 out of 10 adults were now aware of at least one term referring to high-definition TV, and 84% have seen HDTV somewhere in the last year. 53% said they felt positive about the transition from analog to digital TV.
March 30, 2005 
