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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—it doesn't matter as much as the fact there is no box—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.

On December 27, Amazon.com and Warner Music Group announced that WMG's entire 2.9 million-song catalog would be available on Amazon's DRM-free, à la carte MP3 store—the first time the entire Warner catalog has been available online and the first time it has been offered sans DRM.

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.

I don't want a symphony orchestra in my room: That's crazy. I want their <I>music</I>, played with enough realism that I can hear how it's done.

Now that Christmas has come and gone, and my need to hear Bobby Helms' "Jingle Bells Rock" has subsided &mdash; I'm not sure but I think it has something to do with those electric guitar flourishes&#151, it's seems an appropriate time to say something about the continuing and astonishing turmoil in the record business which according to most sources experienced a nearly 20 percent decline in sales of physical product compared with last Christmas.