LATEST ADDITIONS

So string theory <I>is</I> good for something?

There are three requirements: You must invent a very good loudspeaker that sells for between $1000 and $2000/pair. You have to make enough of them, over a long enough time, to achieve a certain level of brand recognition and market penetration. And you must create a dealer network of reasonable size, with an emphasis on well-promoted specialty shops.

The first time I attended the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, in January 1986, I didn't get there until the second day of the Show. Still, by the beginning of the fourth and final day I'd managed to visit every high-end audio exhibit, and still had time to go back for seconds to the rooms that had sounded the best. Twenty years later, CES has grown so much that it's impossible for a single writer to visit even a quarter of the exhibits in which he might be interested. And even with the sort of <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2007/">team reporting</A> <I>Stereophile</I> now practices, covering the Show has become an exercise in applied logistics for the busy journalist: "Should I wait for the free shuttle bus? Should I get a taxi&mdash;though I might get caught in Las Vegas's increasing traffic jams, or even just get stuck at the city's interminable traffic lights? Or should I take the new monorail&mdash;though that goes nowhere near the hotel in which [<I>insert name of hot company</I>] is demming its products?"

All right, it's time for a pop quiz in Loudspeaker Design 101. Answer the following, and justify your answer.

Let's forget about buying re-releases or back-filling an artist's catalog for a moment, what is the <I>primary</I> way you discover brand-new music to buy?

Harmonia Mundi, one of the world's leading independent classical music labels, has finally taken the downloading plunge. In an agreement with the Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA), the world's largest distributor of digital music content, announced on January 24 at the annual music conference of the Marche International De l'Edition Musicale (MIDEM) in Cannes, Harmonia Mundi will make available its entire catalogue of early music and contemporary recordings to hundreds of digital music outlets around the world. IODA will also handle digital distribution of HM's catalogue within France, where Harmonia Mundi is headquartered. A separate agreement with Apple's iTunes makes all Harmonia Mundi titles available on that site as well. Also available are the classical, world, and jazz titles from the more than 30 independent labels that Harmonia Mundi distributes in many parts of the world.

Out of all the audiophile phrases, none stirs the hearts of music lovers like "true to the master tape"&mdash;not even "the absolute sound" of the original instruments, which even audio idealists realize is simply too much to demand. But true to the sound of the recorded master tape, now surely that's a goal within reach.