LATEST ADDITIONS

Her father is John Lenard Burnett of Lenard Audio, a veteran designer, researcher, and educator whose work has crossed over from recording studios, concert halls, and commercial spaces to hi-fi for the home. The Opal 4-way active loudspeaker system is the senior Burnett's signature product and serves as the foundation of Lenard Audio's hardware and strategic designs.

"When I was a baby, Lenard was the largest manufacturer and supplier of concert PA systems and guitar amps and so on in the Australian market," Nel told me. "Some of my very first memories are of me sitting on his workbench. That was one of my happiest places to be when I was a kid, literally sitting on his work."

That wasn't streaming exactly, or not in the current sense, because the files needed to be downloaded, stored locally, then either played out of a computer or loaded onto a portable player, but from that point forward it was a steady march to the streaming-dominated present.

Never mind Napster—the first subscription audio "streaming" service was one you probably wouldn't think of: Audible, the audio book service now owned by Amazon, which started up in 1995. I did beta testing and editing work for early-days Audible, and around that time, I started loading up home-ripped MP3 files on a pocket-sized Rio MP3 player (which by then had replaced Audible's proprietary player), using it in place of a portable CD player. This led to experiments with a PC music library/player running Linux, controlled by a Handspring PalmOS device connected to the stereo system via a Sound Blaster 16 card.