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Good Listening Audio, which ushered in the digital home entertainment age when the CD arrived more than two decades ago, has seen the most challenging transition to digital technology. Pressured by the rise of home theater and hamstrung by copyright issues related to digital downloading, home and portable audio product sales endured several difficult years but have begun to recover. Total audio sales rebounded to $5.5 billion in 2004, a welcome increase of 15 percent over the previous year. Portable MP3 players lead the resurgence, more than doubling to 6.9 million unit sales and – significantly – tripling in revenues to $1.2 billion. Other audio categories also posted modest gains including home-theater-in-a-box (HTIB), separate components and compact systems. And there's promise for the future of high quality audio with the new generation of products for more discriminating listeners, including Super Audio CDs (SACD), DVD-Audio (DVD-A) and loudspeakers designed expressly to take advantage of these advances. |
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