LATEST ADDITIONS

Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor have written <I>Faking It: the quest for authenticity in popular music</I>, a book that tackles the "pop paradox": the harder popular musicians try to "keep it real," the faker their music becomes.

<I>Variety</I> headline: "Digital proves problematic." Oh who would have ever thunk it? Oh wait&mdash;maybe it was us audiophiles.

Over the years, I have used and enjoyed in my audio system large, single-purpose components. Each of these chassis has had but one role: preamplifier, amplifier, digital-to-audio converter (DAC), etc. I guess I've been just a little suspicious of products with multiple functions crammed into a single small chassis; I've figured that the designer may have cut a corner that could affect the sound.

Taken together, these unusual interconnect, loudspeaker, and AC cables brought a new measure of spaciousness, scale, smoothness, heretofore unimagined detail, and overall musical ease and naturalness to my music system. And they did it while sounding neither dull nor bright&mdash;just right.

Almost immediately on entering the analog marketplace in 1982, Franc Kuzma, a mechanical engineer based in Slovenia, then part of the former Yugoslavia, established a reputation for manufacturing finely engineered, high-performance products that sold at reasonable prices. Kuzma's early industrial designs, however, while serviceable, looked less than distinguished.

The Internet audio forum <A HREF="http://www.head-fi.org/forums">Head-Fi</A&gt; is one of the few places on the Web where you can hang out with truly passionate audiophiles and not come away despairing at the state of current public discourse. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that Head-Fi's regional and national meets have that same sense of relaxed solidarity. But what always strikes me at these events, such as the national Head-Fest 2007 get-together in San Jose on April 21 and 22, is just how darned sociable Head-Fiers are, considering they are celebrating an activity that is so intensely solitary.

On April 16, the US Copyright Review Board (CRB) denied an appeal of its decision to restructure the royalty fees for Internet radio. As we <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/news/031907internet/">reported</A&gt;, independent Internet broadcasters and the NPR called it a "stunning, damaging decision," predicting that it would price small operators and public broadcasting, which do not receive widespread commercial underwriting, out of business.