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Now is clearly crunch time for satellite radio. In the last year alone, over one million new subscribers have been added to front-runner <A HREF="http://www.xmradio.com">XM Satellite Radio</A>'s service, bringing its total to approximately 1.4 million. The company projects that it will reach a total of 2.4 million subscribers by the end of 2004, thus ensuring its survival.

This week we have two John Atkinson speaker reviews from the February 2004 issue. First, JA gets his hands on the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/loudspeakerreviews/204bw">B&W 705 loudspeaker</A>, commenting, "When I heard about the company's new 700 series of speakers, based on the technology featured in their cost-no-object Nautilus series but priced to sell in the real world, I asked to review the $1500/pair 705."

Contrary to popular assumption, music downloads and CD sales may reinforce each other. That's one reasonable interpretation of mid-February music industry statistics from the United Kingdom.

Quad: The Closest Approach
by Ken Kessler. Cambridge, England, UK: International Audio Group Ltd., 2003. Hardcover, 12" square, 215 pp. ISBN 0 954 57420 6.
Available from: Quad dealers or IAG America, 15 Walpole Park South, Walpole, MA 02801. Tel: (508) 850-3950.

<I>Five years: My brain hurts a lot.</I>&mdash;David Bowie

When I was first getting interested in "high fidelity," as we called it back in the 1960s, there was an audio dealer in Worthing, England called Bowers & Wilkins. Their advertisement in the February 1966 issue of Hi-Fi News features their annual sale, with a Quad Electrostatic Speaker priced at £30 instead of the manufacturer's recommended £37, and offering other bargains, from ReVox, Quad, Rogers, Leak, and Armstrong. Conspicuous by their absence from the ad are Bowers & Wilkins speakers. The first reference to those I could find was in the August 1968 issue of what was then called The Gramophone, when race-car driver turned audio critic John Gilbert raved about the P2 Monitor. Designed by avid concertgoer John Bowers with Peter Hayward and featuring an EMI bass unit and a Celestion tweeter, the two-way P2 was priced at more than twice the Quad speaker, at £159/pair.

Music reproduction has certainly come a long way since the early wax cylinder. But will we ever be able to perfectly reproduce the sound of, say, a live jazz quartet in our living rooms?