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Bright April Sunday sunshine beams through the bay window of my listening room. The light catches four loudspeakers on stands, two stacks of electronic equipment, a small video monitor, black cables strung behind furniture, and a pile of freshly opened DVDs. I sit in the center in a large, overstuffed chair covered in blue velvet, listening to an array of six loudspeakers and a TV monitor playing The Haunting's DTS soundtrack. The floor rumbles as the sounds of creaking timbers come up from below.

Bonnie and I decided to avoid the crowds last weekend, and instead settled in at home to watch the recent remake of <I>Great Expectations</I>, with Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow. It seemed like a pretty good movie, but before long I found my thoughts drifting to the review I had in progress: my audition and analysis of the Magnepan Magneplanar MG3.6/R. True, <I>Great Expectations</I> is a little slow, and a few explosions or car chases might have better held my attention, but if ever there was an audio product to which the phrase "great expectations" applied, it's the Magnepan 3.6/R.

<B>MAHLER: Symphony 6</B><BR> Manhattan School of Music Symphony Orchestra, Glen Cortese (cond.)<BR>Titanic 257 (CD). 2000. Charles G. Thomas, exec. prod., Jerry Bruck, eng., Michael Karas and Eric Wagner, assoc. engs. AAD? TT: 76:27<BR> Performance: <B>****?</B><BR> Sonics: <B>*****</B>

Reader "Bob" says that he'd be very happy to pay for access to a complete Web-based version of <I>Stereophile</I>, and suspects other readers would too. Do you agree that this is a good idea?

Back in 1997, DVD-Audio was still miles away&mdash;and it may still be! But, as John Atkinson writes, "After a decade of stability, with slow but steady improvement in the quality of 16-bit/44.1kHz audio, the cry among audio engineers is now '24/96!'&mdash;meaning 24-bit data sampled at 96kHz. Not coincidentally, DVD offers audiophiles a medium with the potential for playing back music encoded at this new mastering standard." The <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/259/">dCS Elgar D/A processor</A> was one of the first consumer units able to decode 24/96, and still stands as a benchmark product. JA gives the details.

Late August news bites: <A HREF="http://www.ti.com/">Texas Instruments</A> announced August 25 the completion of its acquisition of chipmaker <A HREF="http://www.burr-brown.com/">Burr-Brown Corporation</A> in a stock swap. Burr-Brown is highly regarded in the audio industry for its low-noise, high-speed digital/analog converters and digital signal-processing (DSP) ICs. The company also makes ultra-high-quality analog components, a segment of the semiconductor industry expected to grow by 25% in the coming year, according to industry analyst Dataquest.

Last week, <A HREF="http://www.bmgentertainment.com/">BMG Entertainment</A>, the music and entertainment division of <A HREF="http://www.bertelsmann.de/">Bertelsmann AG</A>, revealed that it will join several other major labels (see previous stories <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10798/">EMI</A&gt; and <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10814/">Universal</A&gt;) by bringing its own digital downloads to the Internet this September. The company says that it will start with approximately 50 songs and 50 complete albums, to be made available via several retail Web outlets at prices ranging from $1.98 to $3.49 per song and from $9.98 to $16.98 per album.