LATEST ADDITIONS

Unless you've been on active duty in the Middle East, you're aware that Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab is back in business. During <I>Stereophile</I>'s Home Entertainment 2003 show in San Francisco last June, <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/musicintheround">Kal Rubinson</A> and I played hookey to visit MoFi mastering engineer Paul Stubblebine's recording studio, at 1340 Mission Street. As we sat spellbound, Paul played the original four-track, &#189;", 1-mil master tape of Stanislaw Skrowaczewski and the Minnesota Orchestra's legendary 1974 recording of Ravel's <I>Bol&#233;ro</I> and <I>Daphnis et Chlo&#233;</I> (footnote 1). Stubblebine fed the four discrete channels from the specially modified ReVox reel-to-reel deck to a modern surround system. The master tape produced the cleanest, purest sound I had heard in a long time.

Loudspeaker design is an art and a science. Anyone who tells you it's only one or the other is probably building or listening to some awful-sounding speakers. Design a speaker in an anechoic chamber for the "theoretical" world, and there's no guarantee it will sound good in the real one. Even building a speaker that excels at "real-room" measurements doesn't guarantee that it will sound all that convincing when reproducing music. We can't measure everything, and what we can measure can't be reliably ranked in terms of what's important to most listeners.

Audiophiles pride themselves on their love of music, but it may turn out that their kids or spouses buy more music. Who buys the most music in your household?

On April 9, the European Commission announced that it was suspending its antitrust investigation into the proposed merger between the music divisions of Sony Corporation and German media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG.

An old adage has it that one common type of fool believes that anything new must be better.

Will the decline ever end for the music business?

Music buyer beware: <A HREF="http://www.sunncomm.com">SunnComm</A&gt; announced last week the dubious milestone that it had shipped over one million restricted MediaMax audio CDs in March and expects to beat those numbers in April. The MediaMax M4 suite of "Digital Content Enhancement" technologies is built using the Microsoft Windows Media 9 Series platform.