LATEST ADDITIONS

When it comes to purchasing and using electronics products, the gap between men and women appears to be disappearing. That's one conclusion reached by a study conducted in early October by eBrain Market Research and published by the <A HREF="http://www.ce.org/">Consumer Electronics Association</A>. The study, titled <I>Women, Men & Consumer Electronics</I>, questioned 1000 random households about their involvement with electronics technology.

First up, from the November, 2000 issue, is the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//amplificationreviews/291/">Hovland HP-100 preamplifier</A>. Michael Fremer writes, "While the HP-100 is Hovland's first publicly traded audio component, it is . . . the fulfillment of what's been Robert Hovland's goal all along: to bring such a product to market. Or so I was told. It's just taken 'some time to get it all right.' Given the company's history of more than 20 years, that sounds like an understatement." Fremer offers his sonic assessment.

A new era in radio will begin on November 30, when a rocket lifts off from the <A HREF="http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/baikonur_cosmodrome_000710.html… Cosmodrome</A> in Kazakhstan carrying a commercial digital radio transponder to a geosynchronous orbit over North America. The satellite, which belongs to <A HREF="http://www.siriusradio.com/detect_flash/index_flash.htm">Sirius Satellite Radio</A>, will eventually beam as many as 100 stations providing "CD-quality" sound to listeners throughout the continent.

I must share with you an e-mail from reader Gene Radice (mediphor@ptd.net), in response to my September "Fine Tunes," on avoiding slap-echo. "Your columns are so refreshing to read," it began.

There's a whorish aspect to reviewing that some readers and industry critics never tire of mentioning, as if they've stumbled onto some great revelation: that we writers seem to flit from new product to new product, sometimes gushing like cracked fire hydrants over one amplifier one month, only to gush over another amp the following month.

Metallica's Lars Ulrich and Creed's Scott Sapp don't get it. But Courtney Love understands, and so does Stereophile's Jon Iverson, who pointed out in the October issue's "As We See It" that the dispute between the RIAA and Napster is more important to audiophiles than it might seem. The Napster-MP3 phenomenon is a crack in the dike that controls music distribution. How the water seeps through that crack now will determine how it will flow when the drip turns into a trickle, the trickle into a stream, the stream into a river. Audiophiles and pop-music fans alike will be in the same boat.

New music, or a fresh interpretation of an old classic, is what keeps a music lover's life interesting. What three releases have been in heavy rotation for you recently?