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In the future, a laundry list (if premium home stereo brands might well include names like Philips, Harmon Kardon, Sony, Pioneer, and Lansonic.
Lansonic?
With its new Digital Audio Server DAS-750, Lansonic - a new brand launched this year by Burlington-based Digital Voice Systems - has created a bridge between the converging home audio and computing worlds.
Lansonic, Cambridge-based Lydstrom and a number of other competitors expected to enter this new
market in the coming months are vying to create a new niche in audio market. Although their approaches differ, the basic idea is consistent: employ digital compression, database, networking, and other computing technologies to enable audiophiles to store thousands of songs on a single device that sits in the living room.
Lansonic's Digital Audio Server looks like a standard stereo component. But a peek under the hood discloses something of entirely different genealogy: hard disks with capacities ranging from 20 gigabytes to 120 gigabytes, optical and coaxial digital audio inputs and outputs, a Crystal Semiconductors 20-bit digital-to-analog converter, and built-in Ethernet capability.
Combine all this with conventional stereo inputs and outputs, and you get a...