LATEST ADDITIONS

Tom Dowd, a recording engineer and producer who created some of the greatest pop, jazz, and rock recordings of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, and who ushered in the era of multi-track tape recording and stereo playback, died Sunday, October 27 of emphysema at an assisted living center in Aventura, Florida, near Miami. He was 77.

One would think the last thing the music industry needs right now is to further alienate its customers who are still buying discs. But that is just what the record labels are doing by secretly experimenting with technology that restricts how discs are used, says a new report.

The first half of the fiscal year has been generally kind to many Japanese electronics manufacturers, most of whom released financial reports at the end of October.

We all know that women generally have better hearing than men and enjoy music at least as much as men do, but women are conspicuously absent from every segment of the high-end audio scene. The vast majority of high-end companies are owned by men, and any head count of female designers, retailers, reviewers, or consumers will yield a pitifully small number. High-end audio is a man's, man's, man's world.

Reader Stephen M. Rose wants <I>Stereophile</I> readers to confess their audio sins. Do you ever use tone controls in your current system?

"We are now well past the era in which every review of digital playback equipment had to begin with an apology for the medium," writes Thomas J. Norton. As a case in point, TJN takes the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/692/">Mark Levinson No.37 CD transport & No.36S D/A converter</A> out for a couple of spins.

Small webcasters have won another reprieve from royalty payments.