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Art and commerce are butting heads once again, now that England's popular Brit Awards include a category for classical music. Last month's inaugural nominees included some highbrow names (Rachmaninoff, Bryn Terfel), but leaned heavily on such "crossover" artists as Paul McCartney for his orchestral forays, and classical violinist Kennedy (formerly known as Nigel Kennedy) for <I>The Kennedy Experience</I>, his CD inspired by Jimi Hendrix. Classical sales are still down, and record companies, one suspects, are latching onto quasi-classical popular works to boost the sector's profile. For traditionalists, of course, this shows that classical music is falling further into the cultural black hole of all things Madonna, Spice Girls, and McDonald's. They're pissed&mdash;in the American sense, that is.

The other night I heard The Tallis Scholars&mdash;the world's foremost exponents of Renaissance polyphony&mdash;sing in the Chorus of Westerly's performance hall, in Rhode Island: an 1886-vintage former Roman Catholic church with nearly all of its original horsehair plaster intact (footnote 1). Even sitting back in the cheap seats, the sound was glorious. I have never heard a vocal ensemble sing with more finesse, pitch security, or blend of tone.

At last January's Consumer Electronics Show, one of the more musically satisfying rooms I visited in Las Vegas' Alexis Park Hotel was hosted by Canadian magazine <I>Inner Ear Report</I>. I had visited the room ostensibly to take a look at the Audiophile APS AC regeneration system, but I also wanted to give a listen to the Gershman Acoustics Opera Sauvage speakers that I had agreed to review for <I>Stereophile</I>&mdash;not just the speakers in the abstract, but the very samples that, after CES, were going to make the trek to my Brooklyn listening room.

The oldest verified surviving recording is an 1878 tin cylinder of a talking clock (you can hear it at <A HREF="http://tinfoil.com/cm-0101.htm">tinfoil.com/cm-0101.htm</A&gt;). There's just one problem, however; the recording's surface noise is so pronounced that you can barely hear the featured attraction. Chalk it up to age, imperfect recording media, poor storage, or even to the ravages of mold, but the facts remain the same&mdash;we're in danger of losing our audio patrimony: the hundreds of thousands of historical recordings from the dawn of recording.

Since it has been five years since the debut of SACD, one might think that the debate as to where it fits within the audiophile food chain would have been put to rest. But as with most things audio, reality conspires to make rational comparisons between formats tough. One is never sure if two releases on different formats have been rendered from the same source, or, <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/11649/">as we discovered</A> with the recent <I>Dark Side of the Moon</I> hybrid SACD, from completely different masters.

<I>Stereophile</I>'s John Atkinson teams up with world-renowned recording engineer Tony Faulkner to create a landmark Mozart recording that has just been released simultaneously on hybrid SACD/CD, and LP. In <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/musicrecordings/804k622">Project K622</A>, JA recounts the entire process, noting, "The upbeat is the most magic moment in classical music making."