LATEST ADDITIONS

Brian Tucker, the US Quad importer, introduced me to the Woodside MA50 tube amplifiers and their manufacturer, John Widgery, during the 1992 Summer CES. Tucker's combination of Woodside MA50 tube amplifiers and <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/416">Quad ESL-63 USA Monitor</A>s sounded unusually neutral, dynamic, and detailed. This was good news; back in 1987, Dick Olsher (Vol.10 No.6, pp.104&ndash;5) was unable to recommend an earlier Woodside-manufactured amplifier, the Radford STA 25 Renaissance. Brian mentioned that the MA50's design is a much-improved version of that earlier Radford model. Time for another review.

<I>"A high-quality amplifier must be capable of passing rigid laboratory measurements, meet all listening requirements, and be simple and straightforward in design in the interest of minimizing performance degradation..."</I>&mdash;Cdr. Charles W. Harrison Jr., <I>Audio</I>, January 1956 (footnote 1)

Digital Music Association (DiMA) and Sound Exchange (SX) announced on August 23 that they had reached an agreement to "cap the Internet radio '$500 per channel minimum royalty' at $50,000 per service, signaling the start of productive negotiations and bringing resolutions to three important music industry issues," according to DiMA's press release.

<I>Hint to recording engineers:</I> Anna Netrebko gives it to you in the second sentence of graf 8.

"I'm an abstract expression," Huckleberry boasts. "Bold, vivid, active&mdash;wait, what was that middle thing again?"

In 2005, journalism professor Michael Skube wrote an uninformed "think" piece about blogs and blog culture, concluding that bloggers didn't do "real" journalism. (He's probably seen this one.) On August 19 this year, he did what hacks do&mdash;he wrote the same piece again, this time for <I>The LA Times</I>.

I don't disagree with the need for contemplative silence, but I find our contemprary society particularly ill-suited to it. Perhaps iPods are the cure to noise pollution rather than the problem itself.