LATEST ADDITIONS

Waaay before it becomes audiophilia. A documentary about the Audiophile Club of Athens.

Microsoft's Zune, that is. Andy Ihnatko's <I>Chicago Sun-Times</I> review is pretty much perfect. Don't write him off as an Apple cultist, however. He gives props to the PDDs that get it right.

Quarks, photons, and space-time foam&mdash;oh my!

We received an interesting email from engineer Richard Burwen just before the Thanksgiving business break:

On November 22, the Librarian of Congress issued a&mdash;take a deep breath&mdash; <A HREF="http://www.copyright.gov/1201/">declaration of exemption</A> from the prohibition against circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. In other words, the LOC decreed that six classes of "non-infringing rights" were exempt from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which criminalized "production and dissemination of technology whose primary purpose is to circumvent measures taken to protect copyright."

We were driving to a friend's house to celebrate her dad's 92nd birthday. Halfway there, a bright yellow, ground-hugging insect pulled in front of my car from across street. "Wow, that's a Lamborghini Countach!" I exclaimed. You don't often see one of those in my neighborhood&mdash;or in any neighborhood.

As Hans Christian Oersted, the Danish physicist and founder of electrodynamics, discovered in 1819, an electric current passed through a wire generates a magnetic field. Place that wire close to a permanent magnet and the interaction of the two fields will generate a force. That, in two sentences, summarizes the operating principle of the motor that energizes every moving-coil drive-unit in millions of loudspeakers worldwide. It sounds simple, but&mdash;like everything in audio&mdash;it isn't.