Scheduled for Friday June 1–Sunday June 3 in sunny Orange County, California's red state within a blue state, the second annual T.H.E. Show Newport Beach has already expanded from the Hilton Hotel, right across the street from the John Wayne/Orange County Airport, to the adjacent Atrium Hotel. Just shy of 300 exhibitors are expected to fill 80 hotel rooms and 15 huge exhibit rooms in the Hilton, 10 or 12 booths in the Hilton "Marketplace," and another 35–40 hotel rooms and 15 huge exhibit rooms in the Atrium.

At 12 noon PST today, Dolby Laboratories, Inc. announced the availability of the first Blu-ray Discs™ premastered using Dolby® TrueHD with advanced 96k upsampling, The process, designed for use by studios, authoring houses, and mastering facilities, elevates playback performance of lossless audio on Blu-ray Disc™ by using the apodizing filter developed by Meridian.

Each monthly issue of Stereophile includes an updated calendar of all the different hi-fi events taking place across the United States. We also maintain this calendar on our Facebook Events page. One of the events that really caught our eye was the Blind Cable Comparison Tests performed by the Audio Society of Minnesota, which took place on Tuesday, April 17th. Here is the report as submitted by members of the Audio Society of Minnesota. The Society reported record crowds for this event. Hopefully, this spirit of questioning, discovery, and fun will spread to other audio events across the country

Friday, May 11, at 5pm: Sight + Sound (Studioplex, G8, 659 Auburn Avenue, Old Fourth Ward, Atlanta, GA) hosts its grand opening as both a contemporary art gallery and high-end audio equipment retailer. The gallery will showcase artwork from local artists while exhibiting gear from T+A, Nordost, and Elipson.

The early bird catches the worm, but the well-warmed playback system is another thing altogether: So it was when I visited New York’s Stereo Exchange on the morning of April 13, mere minutes after they opened their doors for the day. Nevertheless, the ever-genial David Wasserman and his staff hit the ground running, cheek-to-jowl with eager customers and representatives from 11 equipment suppliers, whose presence had at least something to do with the New York Audio and AV Show.

As we reported below, Manhattan retailers Lyric and Stereo Exchange decided not to participate in the New York Audio & AV Show, instead holding standalone events at their stores. There are valid reasons for this decision, not the least of which is that the manufacturers are spared the crapshoot of setting up their systems in rooms with unknowable acoustics. By contrast, every dem room at a retailer is, or should be, an optimized machine for making audio components sound at their best, which surely is the point. However, if every retailer decided to do this, there would be insufficient support for the main show to take place. There would thus be no shows at all, an example of what has been called the "Tragedy of the Commons."

Props, therefore, to Innovative Audio, who both participated in the NY Audio & AV Show with passive and active rooms, but who also invited Showgoers to their premises after the Show closed Friday and Saturday evenings to take a listen under more controlled conditions.