LATEST ADDITIONS

Those who have read this magazine regularly over the past five years know that Canadian designer Vince Bruzzese has been marketing his small, two-way loudspeakers under the Totem Acoustic brand name. Every review of one of these designs has raved about their strong bass response and three-dimensional imaging, but ends with a "but": "the sound is totally awesome, the imaging is holographic, and my wife thinks it looks terrific in the living room, but..."

Are format wars, such as the battle between DVD-Audio and SACD, worth all the trouble? Some would argue that they let the consumer decide what is best, while others feel that these battles should have been fought in the boardroom and standards committee meetings. What do you think?

During the past year, hardly a day has gone by without headlines announcing the latest twist in the fate of embattled free music service <A HREF="http://www.napster.com">Napster.com</A&gt;. Lost in the hysteria was Napster's tiny rival <A HREF="http://www.emusic.com/">Emusic.com</A&gt;, a three-year-old online music venture that always charged its subscribers for downloading tunes, and always paid the copyright holders. For news appeal, Emusic's paltry 10,000 subscribers and languishing stock price didn't compare to Napster's reported 75 million users and major league court battles.

To balance or not to balance? That is the audio question that Martin Colloms sets out to answer in <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//features/335/">Balance: Benefit or Bluff?</A> Although balanced capability is a fashionable feature in many expensive audio products, Colloms writes that "the High End could be paying dangerous, costly lip service to the received wisdom that balanced operation is the goal for an audio system."

Consumers attending the Home Entertainment 2001 Show in NYC, May 11&ndash;13, 2001, will have a unique opportunity to speak with and learn from the home entertainment industry's leading experts. As part of the three-day audio and video extravaganza, the Show will offer educational seminars and panel discussions&mdash;included with the admission ticket price on a first come, first served basis. This is a rare opportunity for consumers to meet with legendary industry journalists, manufacturers, dealers, and others.

Give an engineering team a blank page and a blank check and there's no telling what they'll come up with. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, for example, one company showed a <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/430/">$25,000 CD transport</A> with laser-pickup mechanism that was separate from its disc drive&mdash;almost the cosmic equivalent of having the sun revolve around the earth.

Having the Philips SACD1000 in my system promoted me to spill some ink about the Sony SCD-777ES. In the months I've had this SACD player in my system, my experience of music has been enhanced to the point where I feel more and more confident about the aural judgments I'm called on to make&mdash;because I'm convinced that I'm listening to a digital source on which I can bet the ranch.