LATEST ADDITIONS

<I>Spinner</I> picks 'em. Yeah, it's a list, but this one has the songs embedded, so you can hear the ones you don't know&mdash;or the ones you love, for that matter.

Audiophiles treasure the time spent listening to their systems—but how often do you get to listen to an entire album uninterrupted?

John Mitchell, an outside counsel for the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM), warns that Florida and Utah have passed second-hand goods legislation (familiarly known as "pawn-shop laws") that could make the buying and selling of used CDs extremely unprofitable for stores and inconvenient for consumers trying to unload music they no longer wish to own.

Internet radio streams have received a reprieve from the US Copyright Review Board (CRB) decision to <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/news/042307net/">restructure the royalty fees</A> for the format. In March, the CRB established fees, effective retroactively to the beginning of 2006, that would be ramped up each year through 2010, with a cost of 0.08&#162; per performance (per listener) in 2006, going up to 0.11&#162; in 2007; 0.14&#162; in 2008; 0.18&#162; in 2009; and 0.19&#162; in 2010.

<B>John Atkinson Opens</B>
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I've said it before and I'll say it again: a would-be loudspeaker designer shouldn't even start to <I>think</I> about the possibility of maybe designing a full-range, multi-way loudspeaker until he (and they do all appear to be men) has cut his teeth on a small two-way design. There is still as much art as science in designing a successful loudspeaker, even with all the computer-aided this and Thiele-and-Small that, that even a two-way design requires a designer either to be possessed of a monster talent or of the willingness to undergo months, even years, of tedious and repetitive work&mdash;or of both. For a would-be speaker engineer to start his career with a wide dynamic-range, multi-way design, intended to cover the entire musical spectrum from infra-bass to ultra-treble, seems to me to be a perfect case of an admittedly well-intentioned fool rushing in where any sufficiently self-critical angel would fear to tread.

The $1200 Counterpoint SA-100 amplifier came up to bat fourth in my listening sessions, behind (in order of appearance) the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/solidpoweramps/678">Adcom GFA-555 II</A> (not reviewed here, but sent along by JA for comparison purposes), the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/tubepoweramps/491vtl">VTL Tiny Triode</A> monoblocks, and the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/solidpoweramps/491muse">Muse Model One Hundred</A>. Thus, my progression went from bipolar solid-state to tube to MOSFET, with a wide spread of sonic characteristics between them: stygian bass from the Adcom; uncanny spatial presentation and vocal reproduction from the VTLs; and an overall superior sound from the Muse. I was therefore eager to see where the tube/MOSFET hybrid Counterpoint would fall in this group of very different-sounding amplifiers.

What's in a name? Quite a bit, when you stop and think about it. Would you rather have prostate surgery by Dr. Steadyhand or Dr. Whoops? Names imply a lot, even if we don't consciously make the connection; that's why your Polo shirt was made by Ralph Lauren instead of Ralph Lipshitz.