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The Mirage OM-6 loudspeaker, from Canadian manufacturer Audio Products International, mightily impressed <I>Stereophile</I>'s Tom Norton when he reviewed it back in November 1997. But with its "omnipolar" design and powered woofer, the OM-6 wasn't a speaker for those of us with more conventional tastes in speaker design. So when I heard that Mirage's Ian Paisley was working on a high-performance two-way minimonitor based on the OM-6's drive-unit technology, I asked API's affable PR man, Jeff Percy, for review samples.

The Emerson String Quartet defies conventional wisdom. They like to take risks, and they use the adrenaline that creates to hone their music-making to a fine edge.

We're on a roll here, folks. Last week you told us about the worst singles of all time. Now let's up the ante: what about the worst albums?

CD changers holding hundreds of discs at a time have found their place in a sizable percentage of consumer homes, and have proven especially useful in the custom installation market. Fans of these mega-changers love to drop their discs into one place, never having to crack open a CD case again. Drawbacks, however, include not being able to easily move the disc from home to car or portable, and the mechanical whirring and clanking the machines make as they slowly plow through the user's playlist.

According to numbers just released by the <A HREF="http://www.ce.org">Consumer Electronics Association</A> (CEA), April audio factory-to-dealer sales shot up by 13% to $611 million, representing a year-to-date increase of 10%. The CEA says that audio revenues in all categories except aftermarket autosound experienced double-digit growth in both monthly and year-to-date sales. Aftermarket autosound remained steady, keeping pace with its record-breaking sales in 1999.

Back in 1979, most of us had never seen a digital audio product, much less heard one, but J. Gordon Holt knew what was coming: "The beginning of 1979 saw the introduction of the first samples of what will finally, after 79 years of supremacy, lower the curtain on the mechanically-traced disc: The digital recording." In "<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//asweseeit/240/">High Fidelity at the Crossroads</A>," Holt looks at the new twinkle in Sony's eye and makes some sage observations.

There is a war of words&mdash;and numbers&mdash;being waged in the struggle over copyright infringement and the illegal copying of music. Downloading music is a boon to the music industry, claim some, because it leads to increased sales of CDs. Others present statistics that undeniably prove that downloading will be the death of the music business.