Summary of IMX attendees' reports:
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According to Joyce Eastman of Lucent, LU is out to achieve “no less than world domination” with EPAC. World domination includes handheld players, car players, home entertainment systems etc.
They have been working in stealth but working heartily with the music labels, distributors, producers, engineers and artists to build the professional base. They are beginning to announce to the main public just what they have. According to several sources (including Eastman), EPAC has been judged the number one codec to emerge from the “Project.”
Lucent has existing but not yet announced licensing agreements. Since the SDMI watermarking specs have now been determined (ARIS) LU can move forward with the manufacturing agreements. According to Eastman, several LU OEM players will be available for the holidays. Servers (Java, RealG2, HHp Streamers, and domains) will be activated shortly.
EPAC is compatible with Win32 and MAC and is currently working on the UNIX platform. They are also working on including video. LU will charge for the encoder but the decoder is free to all.
Tomorrow evening, I will expand on the above.
by Haiyaku
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I was in New York on some business today so I stopped by the IMX show and caught the EPAC demonstration by Joyce Eastman of Lucent's Bell Labs New Ventures Group.
The demonstration did not use an e.Digital player as I had hoped, but rather a conventional PC laptop as the the file source. Side by side comparisons of music from a CD source and an EPAC source convinced most in the audience that the CODEC was superb. Although perhaps one-third of the audience could consistently pick the source accurately, the difference was really very small at the higher compression rate (about 11:1) and essentially non-existent at the lower compression rate (about 9:1). Listening conditions were not ideal (large auditorium room with poor acoustics and sound reproduced from two big speakers at the front) but the audience, composed primarily of music-industry participants and a fair number of e.Digital shareholders, was impressed.
Items confirmed at the event:
1. There will definitely be an e.Digital-sourced music player on the market by an OEM for the Christmas holidays, and there is a chance of more than one. Agreements have been made with some details to be worked out shortly. The watermarking selection was one of the last technical issues to be resolved.
2. EPAC is the only CODEC being used in the Madison Project (a joint effort by IBM, Sony, Time-Warner to deliver music on-line in the San Diego area.) EPAC won the compression task in a show-down with other CODECs.
3. Sony Music is very impressed with EPAC, but Sony Electronics may choose to use their inhouse-developed ATRAC CODEC (which Lucent feels is quite good, but not as good as EPAC) in any player they introduce. The door is not closed to e.Digital, however, and management of e.Digital have maintained a regular dialog with Sony for over a year.
4. Lucent is very confident that EPAC will emerge as the standard compression technology due to its superior quality. They indicated that numerous tests (unreleased) have consistently demonstrated that EPAC reproduces sound closer to the CD standard than any other CODEC. Lucent did not feel that any of the other CODECs were even close to their music quality. They also mentioned a number of very well-respected music industry executives who have given EPAC their personal (although private) endorsement. This has aided Lucent in obtaining record label support of EPAC.
5. I believe that all labels will support EPAC, along with the other CODECs and let the consumer market choose the eventual winner.
6. Lucent was quite enthusiastic about the design of the e.Digital portable music player but deferred from making specific comments about when further annoucements would be forthcoming on that element. My personal feeling is that an annoucement will be made in the next two weeks.
7. There was some good-natured banter between representatives of AT&T's a2b CODEC and the EPAC team, but the Lucent position is that the a2b technology is several years behind theirs.
8. Lastly, while Lucent is clearly committed to succeed in this venture and feels confident that it will eventually dominate, they have also adopted a position that they will not enter the consumer marketplace with any product directly. They will work through others, such as the e.Digital/OEM combination, but you will not see a Lucent-branded player on the market.
I expect the Haiyaku, MaryinRed, Elmore.j. and Whitesails (all of whom were at the session and I can certify as very nice people, in addition to being astute investors) will be posting their thoughts on the message boards soon.
by JimC1997
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MORE NEWS FROM INTERACTIVE MUSIC XPO
Today I took time to visit the Interactive Music Xpo and listen in on a workshop given by Lucent. The speakers being Tim Fink (CTO), Rachael Walkden, Joyce Eastman and someone else named Ben. They all are heading up Epac group within Lucent. As I stated earlier their are a feww issues I want to revisit. Please understand that I am investor just like everyone on this board. I tried to listen with an objective ear and am trying to report as best I can. It was however a Lucent workshop and not an EDIG workshop. I will say I was surprised to see how many EDIG investors were their listening just as I was... Their were at least 60 people in the audience.
Again, this is information is what was covered in the workshop in a presentation format and in a question and answer format.
I first want to cover a few question that were proposed earlier in my absence.
EPAC player will be free to end users; TINROAD was correct in saying the decoder will be free to end-users. Their are licensing fees involved on the encoder side. So a company
who would like to use EPAC would have to pay a fee to encode their audio files in this format. Lucent also stated that they have signed licensing agreements with such parties but are not able to disclose them as of yet. Therefore I beleive more news releases will be soon to follow (on the lucent side), I am not sure as to what time frame they have in mind.
They did make it a point to state that their will be player out by Christmas. They did not mention who would be the manufacturer but were keen on EDIG. It seems I missed all of the fun yesterday. It seems Falk was their yesterday and presented a prototype of the player they have in mind to use. Again a major point they were driving home is the fact that it was designed by some 18 year old and it is fantastic. I guess what they are trying to say is that they are in touch with the specific group that will buy this player. So there is a prototype out their and it is supposedly wonderful, I didn't see it but the way they (Lucent) talked about it, it seems like a sure thing.
Lydstrom; has this great player available. We heard about their deal but not much more. It seems this audio componet will be able to store up to 5,000 songs at once! Then it can play 3 streams at once! So you could be in your home office listening to Bach, your soon can be in his room listening to Rock, and your Wife could be listening to Jazz in the kitchen. Really cool huh... More importantly is the fact that they are trying to move beyond the portable areana and provide people with an option. They were trying to drive home the fact that EPAC sounds as good as CD quality stuff. And to the average person it does. Most of the people their were able to tell the difference (sometimes). But remeber they were music
professionals. And in fact they had to admit that it sounded pretty dam good. Oh, we were listening to the player from a laptop that was connected to 2 big speakers (14 inch at least). Again, the home audion pitch, and not just home audio but car, stero, etc...
EPAC supports DSP which is multi-platform. It could play AAC, MP3, MP4, anything. Which does not matter to us because EDIG player provides the OS and Player as an OEM. So we can't lose.
Lucent will have a website dedicated specfically for EPAC. No time frame as to when it might launch but it will be big.
EPAC will support Real and Streaming technologies so you can play right from the web. Band width will be an issue but not in the future when broadband becomes available. It is just great that they can support these things today.
Lucent says that they have been playing it low key on purpose. They have been listening to everyone's needs and plan to make a bigger push now. They realize that their window to compete with MP3 is closing and are amking moves to bring it to the forefront of the industry.
They also say that major announcements have been on hold since final SDMI standards had not been made. You could expect announcements with the finalaztion of SDMI announcements and partnerships from a hardware and software perspective.
And last but not least, EPAC sounded great. As I said they did fool some of the music professionals in the audience. It was a great feeling to know that it is that strong a
product. Again imagine yourself in front of two huge speakers up to loudest setting. MP3 would falter at those levels of listening enjoyment. That is the key, Quality.
Now, I did receive a form to receive a software evaluation for EPAC. There is an agreement you must sign and mail or fax to lucent. The details are below.
Lucent Technologies Inc.
Rachel Walkden/Joyce Eastman
New Ventures Group
Room 2F104
600 Mountain Avenue
Murray Hill 07974
I also picked a brochure on EPAC from lucent. It pictures how an EPAC player as part of Real Audio, Celestial Audio Library and Java Player.
Earlier Posting
This is what I learned today from Lucent.
There will definetly be a player out for Christmas.
Licensing agreements are complete but they cannot make them public yet.
EDIG has a great prototype that Lucent loves
EPAC supports DSP which supports multiple playing standards.
Downloads can be available by kiosk or POP (point of purchase) at retail stores and mall.
Different Platforms supported: Window, Mac, and Windows CE, Linux will be next...
Lucent will have a new website dedicated to EPAC.
Support of Real and Streaming technologies.
Ready for Liscensing today.
EPAC player will be free to end-users.
Most manufactures were waiting for final SDMI specs before making announcements. Annmouncements should folllow soon.
Lucent will be making a big push soon; they have spent the last year studying the market and it's needs and now feels like it has a product that meets everyone's requirments.
Best of all, EPAC sounds great. It had some of the music industry professionals confused as to which was EPAC and which was CD.
I will expand on these hot points later.
By Juanproano
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Although as I reported earlier to my trained ears the compression is audible, as mmbull pointed out and Dateweenie explained to me the ePAC compression ratio is variable so that one could choose the ratio vs. data trade off.
LU is going to WAR for their CODEC and we're riding shotgun!
One more thing I learned tonight, correct me if I'm wrong, is that MicroOS is the only OS that can support multiple CODECs!!! So step right up. Come and get and get your red hot spicy LU/TI/EDIG/SNDK guts for your digital download Christmas player!!! I want that little red one, with eDigital written all over it. Can I get a mug with that?
So enjoy the show, brought to you soon by flash memory nearby.
This is from before today's show.
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By: elmore.j.
Reply To: 56085 by KOAJ Tuesday, 10 Aug 1999 at 10:28 AM EDT
Post # of 56953
Notice how he found ample space to discuss us, but none to add the stt/tts involvements of eDigital.
BTW - He is right about one thing ePAC is NOT a hi-fi format. It is compressed, and although it may be better than A2B and MP3, I could guess which sample was ePac and which was CD everytime. LU failed however to provide an MP3 sample for and A/B/C comparision .
I saw and heard both the Nomad and the RioPort. The Nomad was weak. In the open Javitz Center there was MUCH caucaphony bandying about and the Nomad failed to deliver ample volume. It's controls were made through a central LCD screen and more difficult to access. The RioPort was a much nicer unit, larger in size, easy to use and understand, and the volume was strong with that slick flash memory on some of the models. They will be our present competetion.
IMO the CODEC is not even an issue and the Chirstmas market is only an issue if EDIG has the only player on the market that is SDMI compliant. As far as sound quality, it was impossible to judge fairly from the conditions at the Expo. To fairly judge the quality of the CODEC one would have to play them both from the same set up and through much better amplification. You cannot judge sound quality through a headphone amp and headphones. The EDIG unit did seem, however, to offer much more robust, less compressed sound. Hopfully today's demo will be more revealing.
I also get the impression that the EDIG player is a done deal and the only real announcements will be who, how many and what color.
If you missed my report from last night, here it is:
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Report from IMX Day 1.
Hello all. This will be a brief note as I am tired from a long day at the Expo, but I did want to share a few things.
First, I spent several hours speaking with Fred this morning and in a word - WOW! For those who have met him I think you will agree, and for those who haven't take the opportunity if you get the chance. He is the real deal. I didn't bother prying him for info that he couldn't disclose, but instead asked him about his background before coming to eDigital and his contributions since. As has already been told on this board, he took over a bloated, misdirected company with deep financial problems and shouldered the burden and turned things around by understanding the potential of their existing strengths and diligently developing relations with the major players that we all know. This is clearly a result of his personality, experience and talent. We are very lucky to have this man at the helm of our investment.
As for Hai- Cool. Way Cool. We don't know the half of it. She gave me a few tid bits of her recent valuable contributions to eDigital, while she obiously wanted to share everything, as that is her nature, she too must be constrained. I ask Hai about her background and was surprised at her years of serious experience in business and as an investor which preceded her career as an enlightened teacher.
And finally, I listened to ePAC and also saw the RioPort and the Nomad. And if anyone thinks we have any competion let me tell you, we have seen their hand, but they haven't seen ours!
I will report back more about the rest of the Expo starting on Wednesday when the smoke clears.
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BTW - I think that A2B will be a non-issue, although they did get their logo on the badge straps.
by elmore.j
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IMX & Lucent/eDig: WHAT'S IMPORTANT
A special and sincere thanks to all attendees posting their impressions and shared experiences at the IMX show. We are privileged to live in a great country at a very unique period in its growth. I'm certain we are among the most knowledgeable investors of any single company all because we've shared our knowledge and life experiences through this forum. I'm just reflecting on the uniqueness of the research base that we've created.
We haven't yet heard directly in detail from Hai at this time and there may be additional info we'll hear from her.
The main position taken by Lucent for delay in announcements was apparently caused by SDMI's 5 week overrun in final specs. That the sound of ePac was superb is no surprise. That IBM, in charge of the Madison Project, is running only ePac (post 56908) is the very best news and verification that ePac is the labels' first choice for a preferred format. Remember the labels kicked in their own capital for this project and ePac was the product of choice. Assuming this news is accurate and was made public, that could be the green light for the phone to be ringing off the hook at eDig by customers wanting to get in line to get handhelds out quickly to market.
Sony: The music and electronics divisions don't always work together or have to work together. IF SM picks ePac and SElect. picks their in-house format this literally means no sales in U.S. for their handheld unless it can also run ePac.
"Lucent likes eDig's player"--does that mean that all handheld designs by customers have to go through eDig? I would think so particularly if that customer wants the TI DSP to call on other stored or imported decoders other than ePac. This is a technical, but very important question I want to run by eDig.
I now full expect Lucent will announce agreements with all the labels very shortly and that MS4 and A2B will not get major portions of the label business in new music. MP3 and MP3.com will respectively continue in a decline of popularity and share price. Jim Seymour may soon be backtracking with more add-on articles about eDig gaining in recognition and market share.
After the last 48 hour fusillade from longs on this board, the Basher gang may decide it's not worth their time and effort to mess with the lions on this board, and for MM's to get this work done, the pay rates will have gone up for eDig bashers.
Suspect much more to come over next 2 weeks in terms of contracts and big name companies signing agreements with eDig.
by Twomil |
