Lucent In The Sky With Diamonds

It makes for a great story title, but it would have made it even better if Lucent Technologies had been doing a deal with Diamond Multimedia instead of Lydstrom Inc., but who are we to grumble.

The hype is around a new personal media storage device which is capable of storing the equivalent of 5,000 compact discs and will be available in December, 1999. Made by Lydstrom, the product is targeted at the growing market for networked home entertainment systems that combine types of media, from disc or the Internet.

The "clever" part of the system is ePAC, an compression technology developed by Lucent to compress Internet music at a rate of 11 to 1, delivering "the highest quality Internet music in the industry."

"The home entertainment industry realizes the benefits of Internet-driven content and Lydstrom is capitalising on the growing need for consumer-friendly devices that can address the need for Internet/PC/home stereo convergence," said Rachel Walkden, director of audio initiatives for Lucent's New Ventures Group. "The quality benefits of ePAC over competitive solutions become even more apparent when the music is played through a home stereo."

"Listening to Internet music is no longer confined to the PC-centric world. We've developed a next-generation audio player that delivers on-demand entertainment in an extremely intuitive manner," said Rahul Shah, president of Lydstrom. "The ePAC coder helps us to create a listening experience that has never occurred before. Now, the music lover is closer to having a virtual on-demand universal music library than ever before." Don't you just love these press releases.

ePAC apparently uses "psychoacoustic modeling" [which is a representation of how humans hear sound for those who didn't know ... like us] to compress music in a way that is not noticeable to the ear. There is a whole bunch of other audiophile tech spec that I'm sure someone is interested in, but you'll have to go to the site to check it out.

http://www.lucent.com/

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