LATEST ADDITIONS

<A HREF="http://www.sony.com/SEL">Sony Electronics</A> will soon institute some big changes in an effort to become more efficient.

The last few weeks have been a roller-coaster ride for CD copy-restriction developer SunnComm. The company was riding high in early September when it was <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/11734/">announced</A&gt; that BMG and Arista had chosen its MediaMax CD-3 Technology to restrict how discs are used.

Paul Bolin takes a spin with the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//amplificationreviews/938/">Vacuum Tube Logic TL-7.5 Reference line preamplifier</A>, observing, "For some reason, the light has never shone quite as brightly on VTL's front-end electronics, perhaps in part because it's been so long since the company attempted a headline-grabbing, all-out assault on the state of that art."

Music industry executives may have a special dread of this year's Halloween festivities.

What comes to mind when you think of VTL? If you're like most of us, enormously powerful tube power amplifiers are inseparable from the name. To contemplate VTL is to think of some of the finest-sounding, most potent amps ever built&mdash;from the late-1980s, 400Wpc Ichiban, the first massively powerful tube monoblock of the audiophile era, to the mighty <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//amplificationreviews/157/">Wotan</A&gt; and Siegfried amplifiers of today. All well and good, as far as it goes.

Readers are constantly telling us that downloaded audio files suck. I tend to agree with them.

Dating was murder, especially in the months just before I met my wife. I knew some nice women back then, many of whom were good-hearted and others of whom were beautiful. One was both, and talented, too: She gave me presents for no reason and wrote tender things in cards with pictures of sweet meadows or the sea: <I>My love goes on and on</I>, they said. But for whatever reason, I just couldn't love her back, and Oh! how the shit hit the fan the day I told her so. I meant it as a respectful act of honesty and forthrightness; she took it as a cowardly act of rejection, and responded in a manner that would forever remind me of Maggie bouncing the rolling pin off Jiggs's head while calling him an insect. That day, I learned two things: 1) women are unlearnable; and, 2) honesty, while an unassailably good thing in and of itself, makes a poor tool, mostly because it lacks a safety handle.