LATEST ADDITIONS

<I>The Economist</I> has an uncredited article about <A HREF="http://www.economist.com/world/europe/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=1027… charts</A>. They're all familiar to readers of Edward Tufte's <I>The Visual Display of Quantative Information</I>, but they <I>are</I> great charts.

When I picked up the mail on Saturday, I had an unexpected package. It contained Vance Dickason's <A HREF="http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=9781882580477"><I>Loudspeaker Design Cookbook, 7<SUP>th</SUP> Edition</I></A>. Oh boy!

The world of loudspeaker aficionados has at one end most of us, who use multi-way box speakers of one kind of another; in the center are the lovers of panels, electrostatic, planar magnetics&mdash;it doesn't matter as much as the fact there is no box&mdash;and at the extreme other end are the lovers of high-sensitivity designs, where massive amounts of art, artifice, and loving care are applied to wrest full-range sound from a single drive-unit. Overcoming the daunting problems of getting a single drive-unit to work from 20Hz to 20kHz is, by those, felt to be outweighed by the benefits of not having a crossover circuit.

When we awoke on December 30, we found our in-boxes full of emails linking to <I>The Washington Post</I>'s <A HREF="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/28/AR20071… Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use"</A>, which reported that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) were charging that Jeffrey and Pamela Howell's transfer of 2000 legally purchased recordings to his computer as MP3 files represented "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

I first saw the Shure SE530 at the <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2006/010606shure">2006 Consumer Electronics Show</A>, when it was dubbed the E500. The '500 shared the current product's three-armature driver technology and in-ear, sound-isolating, sleeve fitting scheme, but that early prototype seemed almost crude in comparison with the SE530.

When Hong Kong&ndash;based music lover and electronics-equipment distributor Klaus Heymann (footnote 1), now 70, first began organizing classical-music concerts as a way to boost sales, he had no idea he would end up founding the world's leading classical-music label. But after starting a record-label import business and meeting his future wife, leading violinist Takako Nishizaki, the German-born entrepreneur sought a way to promote her artistry. First he founded the HK label, which specialized in Chinese symphonic music (including Nishizaki's recording of <I>Butterfly Lovers</I>, the famous violin concerto by Chen Gang). Next he established Marco Polo, a label devoted to symphonic rarities.