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Sonic Studio Assumes Responsibility for Philips ProTECH Product Line (8/6/2005)

Philips Product Line to be Further Commercialized by California Audio Tech Leader

Sonic Studio announced today its intent to take over the ownership of the complete portfolio of products and services from the ProTECH subsidiary of Philips, a pro audio business activity within Philips Intellectual Property & Standards (IP&S), based in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. ProTECH delivers complete solutions for the production of Super Audio CD to the professional music Industry. Philips IP&S is the standardization and licensing department of Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V.. Sonic Studio will become fully responsible for Philips ProTECH's products In terms of marketing, sales and distribution, services, support and new product innovations.

This planned acquisition will not invalidate standing sublicensing arrangements with other DSD (Direct Stream Digital) and Super Audio CD (SACD) manufacturers. Existing Philips license contracts will remain in place, with Sonic Studio, LLC servicing and supporting those customers. The intellectual property used in the ProTECH products remain Philips property. As Philips does not operate a professional audio division, this accession benefits the industry by unifying the marketing, sales and business development of key audio technologies under the leader in higher resolution origination and distribution formats.

Sonic Studio will invest in the crossÐplatform DSD technology, that ProTECH pioneered, as a strategic addition to its own production portfolio. Underwriting future development of DSD and SACD technologies, Sonic Studio will productize underdeveloped assets and further commercialize existing products. The company will also actively license their intellectual property to audio manufacturers looking for comprehensive production solutions.

Jayson Tomlin, VP of Sales, stated that "Sonic Studio has always supported pioneering and sonically superior formats, and this acquisition will complete our unique range of DSD mastering and SACD authoring tools. With our global reach into all major markets, we are poised to aggressively promote the SACD format, especially in the pivotal North American region, while reducing the cost barrier to DSD production."

"This purchase strengthens our already trail blazing efforts in the DSD production space. We were the first group outside of the Sony/Philips family to bring a DSD DAW to the marketplace and now we've added Europe's finest SACD knowledge to our product mix," adds Jon Reichbach, president of Sonic Studio. "Since we have been given the task of implementing version 2 of the Cutting Master Format," he continued, "We will be reaching out to all professional audio manufacturers to collectively build consensus and raise consumer awareness."

The ProTECH property includes comprehensive Super Audio CD authoring tools along with encoding, transcoding, metering, disc image building and image validation utilities. In addition, the unique Super Audio Verifier module is the only product that provides desktop playback of replicationÐready, losslessly encoded Direct Stream Transfer (DST) data. The Verifier package includes a single board PCI solution that offers real-time DST decoding followed by realÐtime DSD metering for audio level verification in accordance with the SACD Scarlet Book specification.

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