Logitech, which claims a 97 percent share of the 5.1-channel multimedia speaker market, continues to blur the lines between computer and home entertainment audio. The company is replacing its Z500W 5.1-channel surround-sound speaker system with a digitally driven model due in stores at the end of the month, regional product manager Alan Smith told us at a media briefing Tuesday in New York.

The EPA announced its intention to strengthen the Energy Star specification for TVs even as a new version of the spec is set to take effect in September. The agency this week released a list of “priority areas” for revision of the TV standard that will result in version 6.0. Version 5.3 will take effect Sept. 30. “We have determined from assessing the market and feedback from our stakeholders that the time is ripe to open up the spec revision again,” an EPA official told us. TVs are also among a handful of products the EPA is considering for a top-tier “most efficient” program that it’s piloting this year (CED March 21 p6).

Videogame retailers again fared best among entertainment retailers and movie theaters in the enforcement of ratings as part of the latest secret shopper survey by the FTC, it reported Wednesday. Game retailers “continue to enforce most vigorously the ratings governing age and content that were established by the entertainment media industry,” it said.

Though Intel sustained “some damage” to its Japanese sales and marketing offices in the March 11 quake, it was “nothing major that would hinder our ability to service our customers,” CEO Paul Otellini said on an earnings call as Intel reported improved profit and sales for Q1 ended April 2. Post-quake, Intel saw no “unusual changes or fluctuations to our backlog” of products, nor does it expect “any major disruptions to our supply lines moving forward,” Otellini said. All Intel employees and their families are safe, he said.

Supply chain consolidation could have a stabilizing effect on hard-disk drive pricing, NPD analyst Stephen Baker told us Tuesday, following storage company Seagate’s announcement early Tuesday that Samsung was buying 9.6 percent of the company. “The HDD market requires economies of scale and this segment has been consolidating for a few years,” Baker said. The Samsung-Seagate agreement followed by a month Western Digital’s announcement that it’s buying Hitachi Global Storage Technologies for $4.3 billion.

Sonos said it added support for Apple AirPlay and introduced a free application for Android mobile phones that’s available from Android Market. AirPlay support enables Sonos users to play songs stored on an iPhone or iPad wirelessly over the Sonos system. Users were able to stream music in the past from a PC on the Sonos network, or from the cloud, but they couldn’t take a song straight off the iPhone or an iPad and play it around the house.

Apple claimed in a suit that several Samsung mobile phones and tablets infringed on various Apple patents and trademarks. The suit, filed Friday in a U.S. District Court in San Francisco, claimed Samsung was also guilty of unfair competition and unjust enrichment, among other things.

Autonomic Controls is testing integration support for Amazon’s Cloud Drive service, which the company plans to release for its MMS-2 and MMS-5 Mirage Media servers in Q2, the company said Monday. Autonomic is testing support internally for Cloud Drive and expects to deliver free firmware updates to consumers within 60 days. The company is extending beta testing to qualified Autonomic dealers for in-house trials with demo MMS-5 media server systems, CEO Michael de Nigris told us.

Former Philips Consumer Electronics executive Frans Van Houten used his first quarterly earnings call Monday since taking the helm as Philips CEO on April 1 to announce the company’s departure from its beleaguered TV business. “TV had become a value detractor for Philips,” Van Houten said, so the company had little choice but to transfer the business to China’s TPV Technology under a joint-venture deal.

The new “streamlined rating process” that the Entertainment Software Rating Board introduced Monday is being tested now for downloadable console and handheld videogames only, ESRB President Patricia Vance said in a phone briefing with reporters. There are “no current plans” to use the new partially automated system for games sold at retail, which will continue to use the lengthier existing ESRB ratings process that’s been in place for many years, she said. The ratings in the new process themselves are identical to the existing ratings.