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Pioneer, Marantz, Yamaha, and Onkyo now have universal disc-players on the market. Are you interested?

A long-running dispute between the music industry and small webcasters may have come to an amicable conclusion. Over the weekend of October 5-6, representatives from both sides agreed on a system of royalties to be paid to record labels and artists based on a percentage of webcaster revenue or expenses, rather than on a per song basis. Last summer, Librarian of Congress James Billington decreed that all webcasters should pay a royalty rate of 0.07¢ per song per 1000 listeners. Many small webcasters, including many college radio stations, chose to go offline rather than face fees they couldn't afford.

For years, we've seen attempts to disguise <A HREF="http://www.audiocircuit.com/9041-esl-circuit/Commercial/Audio4-AU4/9041… as paintings</A>. A pair of announcements last week highlights the ongoing drive within the consumer electronics industry to find new ways to hide speakers within other objects.

Media critics may be right: If record companies had spent as much effort building a digital distribution network as they have fighting digital piracy, they might actually be making money online instead of complaining about it. This is the conclusion of a new report from KPMG and the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Sales of recorded music declined by 9.2% on a monetary basis and 11% on a unit basis worldwide during the first half of 2002, according to recently released figures from the <A HREF="http://www.ifpi.org">International Federation of the Phonographic Industry</A> (IFPI). The drop is a continuation of a long slump that began in the mid-1990s, blamed by many music industry executives on the widespread use of CD burners and the popularity of downloading tunes on the Internet. Others acknowledge that increasing competition for consumers' time and money&mdash;especially films on DVD&mdash;is eating into music industry profits.

Rarely has the debut of a new loudspeaker company and its inaugural model created as big a buzz as did Lumen White and their Whitelight speaker at the 2001 Consumer Electronics Show. Driven by Vaic tube amplifiers in one of the larger corner rooms at the Alexis Park Hotel, the big Whitelights had a look and a sound that attracted continuous crowds. Of the questions among audio cognoscenti that I overheard at the end of each day, two of the most common were "Hey, did you hear those Lumen Whites?" and "What? Can you speak louder?"