LATEST ADDITIONS

My interest in wireless network music players began during David Hyman's <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/11662">keynote speech</A> at Home Entertainment 2003. Then CEO of Gracenote, Inc. (footnote 1), Hyman stunned me with his opinion that CDs and DVDs were already obsolete. Rather than pursue discs with greater storage capacity, Hyman urged industry designers to design music-server units with large hard drives to allow instantaneous access to any digital music track. With all of your music stored on a central hard drive, you could, within seconds, locate a specific track among thousands just by knowing the name of the artist, song, group, composer, year of recording, or even recording venue. Music mixes could be instantly grouped into playlists by the owner.

Audiophiles are frequently accused of being more in love with gizmos than with music. There may be a kernel of truth in that, but a scant few companies actually exploit the giz factor to give you <I>mo'</I>&mdash;a <I>lot</I> mo'.

That's pronounced sheeYEUfn (like <I>that</I> helps) and it's from Norse mythology&mdash;Sj&#246;fn inspired passion through her singing. Guru Pro Audio head of R & D, Ingvar &#214;hman is clearly passionate about his loudspeaker, which he likened to "VWs that perform like Ferraris." The Gurus($1800/pair) are small, designed to be placed near the room boundaries, and were pretty impressive.

Some of the sweetest sound I heard in the whole show was delivered by the Jadis Symphonia CD player ($3500), Jadis E-50 50Wpc integrated amplifier ($8000), and Proac 3.8s ($7500/pair).

George Kaye was showing not one, but two new products: the Moscode 402P!

AIX Records' Mark Waldrep, see here with Mona Waldrep, was promoting their latest DVD-Video and DVD-Audio, surround-sound release, <I>Ernest Ranglin, Order of Distinction</I>. Featured performers included Robbie Krieger from the Doors, Phil Chen and Laurence Juber from Paul McCartney's Wings group, and Elan Atias from the Caars. Mark reminded me that his website, Itrax.com, will go operational in June, providing one of the only sites where high-quality, lossless-compressed, surround-sound music files will be available for purchase and downloading.