LATEST ADDITIONS

Out of habit now more than anything else, I keep my cell phone on the floor beneath my bed while I sleep at night. In the morning, when I wake, I still check my cell phone for any messages.

Back around Christmastime, when everyone around me seemed to be receiving iPods and gift certificates to the iTunes store, I thought I should give my loved ones <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/123107talk/">The MP3 Talk</a>. Now, John Atkinson, has prepared another version of <a href="http://www.stereophile.com/features/308mp3cd/index.html">The MP3 Talk</a>&#151live and in color with all sorts of cool graphs and stuff!

If you watch mainstream TV, you've probably seen it: The <A HREF="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eI3frLu32Q">American Express Plum Card ad</A> that features catalog/online analog retailer <A HREF="http://www.MusicDirect.com">MusicDirect</A&gt;. Filmed in December, with little advance notice, the ad debuted on February 19, and is expected to run for several months.

<I>Blender</I> has just posted its nominations for <A HREF="http://www.blender.com/articles/default.aspx?key=18696">greatest record industry screw-ups</A>. I have a few quibbles, but as a whole, <I>Blender</I> tells a tale of monumental stupidity,from Decca passing on the Beatles because Dick Rowe was irritated that too many frantic teens were attempting to get into the Cavern Club to shutting down Napster without having a legitimate channel to replace it.

Like <a href="http://stereophile.com/thefifthelement/208fifth/">John Marks</a> and my uncle <a href="http://blog.stereophile.com/stephenmejias/021308sing/">Omar</a&gt;, I am prone to enthusiasms. It's not unusual for me to hear some new piece of music and wind up feeling that I need it&#151<i>neeeeeeed</i> it. So what? Music is great. It <i>is</i> unusual for me, though, to hear some new piece of music and be so moved by it that I leave work early, race up Madison Avenue, charge down into Grand Central, take the 4 to Union Square, and face the many temptations of the vast Virgin Megastore to buy that new piece of music.

I'm writing these words on the flight home from the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show, held January 7–10 in Las Vegas. I wasn't sure what to expect at this year's CES. Though the official stats show that the US economy has grown for the fourth straight year, audio retailers I spoke with before the Show feel that that economic growth has not resulted in any increase in consumers' disposable incomes. In fact, with the drying up of credit, retailers are concerned that 2008 may well be a step back from 2007 in overall sales, and that high-end audio—a niche category within a niche category—will be adversely affected by the relative impoverishment of the middle class.

<A HREF="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1582330-1,00.html">Her…; an interesting article about Princeton University composer Dmitri Tymoczko, who has string theory mathematics to represent the relationship of musical chords to one another in a graphic form.