LATEST ADDITIONS

After two decades of motorcycling, I recently achieved a long-held goal by buying a bike built by Bimota, a tiny Italian manufacturer. Although Bimota engages in a wide range of activities, from two-stroke engine design to racing, they're best known for their exotic, hand-built street bikes. They always include the very best components and feature cutting-edge engineering and performance, but what they're truly revered for is their style. Bimotas unfailingly combine shapes, textures, and finishes into motorcycles that are most often referred to as "works of art."

A move by RealNetworks to cut the umbilical cord between Apple's iPod and the company's iTunes Music Store has raised the ire of some execs in Cupertino. The computer pioneer is threatening legal and technical retaliation against its Seattle rival in the wake of a late July launch of a digital music technology called Harmony that enables the iPod to work with downloads from RealNetworks' music store.

From its origins as an obscure off-Broadway novelty act, <A HREF="http://www.blueman.com">Blue Man Group</A> has grown to monster proportions, with authorized spinoffs performing in major cities throughout the world. The group is a permanent attraction in Las Vegas.

<I><A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/072604journey/">Audiophile's Journey</A> continues.</I>

Back in June of 1992, Lewis Lipnick auditioned one of the era's benchmark products, the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/amplificationreviews/692cello">Cello Palette Preamplifier</A>. LL comments, "The Palette Preamplifier gives the listener a glimpse of what performers experience every day on stage: total immersion <I>in</I> the music."

<B><I>TEMPLES OF SOUND: Inside the Great Recording Studios</I></B><BR>
by Jim Cogan and William Clark; Foreword by Quincy Jones<BR>San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2003. Softcover, 7.5" by 10", 224 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-8118-3394-1.

When American architect Louis Henri Sullivan said "form ever follows function" (footnote 1), he was referring to the transition from the 19th-century view of architecture, driven by aesthetic concerns, to the bold new 20th-century approach of beginning with a building's functions, and letting the design flow from there.