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The NHT Xd DSP powered speaker demo was held at the Plaza Hotel in New York City last week and representatives from <A HREF="www.nhthifi.com">NHT</A&gt; and its supporting cast, <A HREF="http://www.deqx.com/">DEQX</A&gt; and <A HREF="http://www.PowerPhysics.com/">PowerPhysics</A&gt;, opened by explaining the philosophy behind the new product and the essential components they each contributed (also see <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/022304nht/index.html">previous</A&gt;).

Music copyright issues have been in the new of late, with the RIAA and music labels looking for stricter laws, and many consumer groups looking for more slack. What are your feelings about copyright when it comes to music?

Tom Jung's career has been dotted with numbers. In 1969, he and a partner founded Sound 80, a Minneapolis recording studio named by an advertising wizard who had previously conjured up the appellation Cure 81 for a Hormel ham, supposedly while sipping Vat 69 scotch. Some years later, engineers from another Midwestern company with a numeral in its name, 3M, stopped by with an experimental tape recorder that also employed digits. Those zeros and ones proved critical to the recordings Jung went on to engineer and produce at his next company, Digital Music Products, better known as DMP.

The first time I heard an Audio Note preamp was seven or eight years ago, when I sampled their entry-level M1&mdash;a refreshingly musical thing that brought the same kind of color and drama to preamplification that Audio Note's more famous products brought to the driving of speakers. And the M1 cost only $1250 at the time, with phono stage. (Newcomers, please don't wince: That's awfully cheap for what it was.)

High-end audio has always been a tricky business, and in recent years it's become more so. Home theater is pulling in one direction, and MP3, iPods, and the Internet are pulling in another. And customer expectations&mdash;not just of sound quality, but also of usability and integration into their space and lives&mdash;are spiraling upward. The companies that are thriving amid these pressures seem to have adopted one of two strategies: either they focus more narrowly and try to convince the world to accept their vision, or they evolve their products in an attempt to anticipate the market.

TrueSound Lounge: Headphone giant <A HREF="www.sennheiserusa.com">Sennheiser</A&gt; has opened an online music destination, the Sennheiser <A HREF="http://www.truesoundlounge.com">"TrueSound
Lounge</A>", providing web-surfers an entertaining selection of new music from
company-supported emerging artists like Sugarcult and Jody Whitesides. The site also provides "fun, quick-witted web-video shorts from top commercial filmmakers and producers, fruits of the Sennheiser Invitational Film Project," and "concise info on Sennheiser's unequalled selection of personal listening products," according to a recent announcement.

The <A HREF="http://www.riaa.org">RIAA</A&gt; foresees that digital audio broadcasting (DAB) will represent a fundamental change in the radio industry. "It is not just a means of offering higher quality broadcast sound. DAB could transform radio into a vehicle for the distribution of huge amounts of information in digital form, including recorded music," says the trade organization. As a result, the group is supporting regulatory restraints on digital audio broadcasting (DAB) in reaction to a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Notice of Inquiry (NOI) regarding DAB content control.