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Some products inspire unwavering loyalty among their owners: Gibson's "Les Paul" Guitars, for example, or Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Only a handful of audio manufacturers have been lucky enough for their products to attain this kind of cult status. McIntosh is perhaps premier among them. Individual products---Audio Research preamps, Marantz tuners, Linn turntables---also have deservedly loyal and sizable followings.

Protection for the creative community or job security for lawyers? These are but two of many interpretations of the <A HREF="http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d105:h.r.02281:">Digital Millennium Copyright Act</A>, which won approval by voice vote in the US House of Representatives August 4. The bill will implement into US law the treaties signed by 157 signatories at the World Intellectual Properties Organization conference in Geneva in December 1996. A separate version was passed by the Senate in May. Differences between the two must be ironed out before a final version can be signed into law by President Clinton.

News recently coming out of Cambridge, England promises yet another new revolutionary loudspeaker technology following in the footsteps of <A HREF="http://www.nxt.co.uk/">NXT</A>'s flat-panel speakers and <A HREF="http://www.atcsd.com/">ATC</A>'s <A HREF="http://www.atcsd.com/HTML/whitepaper.html">HyperSonic Sound</A> and <A HREF="http://www.atcsd.com/RELEASES/pr020998.html">Stratified Field Technology</A>. Engineering consultant Tony Hooley heads up a team of researchers who have created what they hope will be a breakthrough in small, lightweight, highly accurate-sounding arrays of digitally driven pressure transducers.

<B>DAVE ALVIN: <I>Blackjack David</I></B><BR> Hightone HCD 8091 (CD). 1998. Greg Leisz, prod.; Paul duGre, Dave Ahlert, engs. ADD? TT: 50:24<BR> Performance <B>****?</B><BR> Sonics <B>****</B>

New companies are springing up all around the web to provide songs for custom CD compilations. (See previous articles <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10185/">1</A&gt;, <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10157/">2</A&gt;.) You go to the site, choose up to 70 minutes of music from their catalog, and the finished disc is mailed back to you in a couple of days for between 10 and 20 bucks. The challenge for these companies is to have an attractive catalog of artists and songs to choose from.

The intentional deafening of monkeys by researchers at the <A HREF="http://www.ucsf.edu/">University of California, San Francisco</A> has provoked a strongly worded protest by Paul McCartney. In a letter dated July 6, McCartney complained to UCSF Chancellor Michael Bishop that "there can be no excuse for inflicting such misery" on animals used in such experiments. The letter was the latest salvo fired in a controversy going back to early February.

In the children's fable, Chicken Little, the archetypal alarmist, induced fear and panic in his community by running amok and shouting, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" The hysterical fowl has many relatives among journalists and economists, who regularly issue dire warnings about the forthcoming Year 2000 problem.