LATEST ADDITIONS

On July 4, a Brazilian website apparently posted some tools that allowed users of <A HREF="http://www.intervideo.com/jsp/Home.jsp">InterVideo's WinDVD</A> to pull copy-protected data off DVD-Audio discs and store it on the user's hard drive rather than simply routing it to a sound card. According to <A HREF="http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/6597.cfm">Afterdawn</A&gt;, the tools didn't "do the decryption themselves, [but] instead patched WinDVD to output the decrypted stream to disk instead of the sound card."

<I>Class&#233;'s new player:</I> <A HREF="http://www.classeaudio.com">Class&#233;'s</A&gt; new Delta line of components now includes a DVD player. The $6500 CDP-300 plays DVD-V, DVD-A, standard CD, DualDisc, Video-CD, S-VCD, and JPEG picture discs, in addition to those encoded with MP3, WMA, and AAC audio formats.

In last week's "Soapbox," reader Mark Gdovin discussed a great bargain CD player he had found. What's the best bargain component you've discovered?

Canadian electronics manufacturer Bryston Limited has been producing consumer and professional amplifiers since 1974 [see Robert Deutsch's interview elsewhere in this issue—Ed.]. Bryston amps are engineered to be physically and electrically rugged, to meet the stringent demands of professionals, many of whom leave their studio amplifiers turned on for years. While chassis had to be light instead of the audiophile massiveness found in some high-end consumer amplifiers, studio engineers and concert pros continued to favor Bryston amps, which easily passed the "steel toe" test. The 4B, for example, became a standard amplifier for recording engineers and touring musicians.

ProAc's designer Stuart Tyler sounded casual&mdash;almost bemused&mdash;when I spoke with him recently about the new 2.5, a floorstanding, two-way ported box in the middle price slot ($4500/pair) of his Response series. While answering my pressing queries about the crossover point, driver materials, cabinet construction, and other reviewer obsessions, his body language said, "Does any of that really matter with these speakers? You know what the real story is here."

On June 27, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of Metro-Goldwin-Mayer (MGM), agreeing that peer-to-peer file-sharing services such as StreamCast Networks and Grokster could be held responsible (<I>read:</I> be sued) if they encouraged their users to infringe copyrights. This will return the "MGM <I>vs</I> Grokster" case to a lower court, where it will be determined whether or not the P2P companies encouraged their users to violate copyright laws.

The music industry has been telling us for years that peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing is a bad thing. But a New York company has decided the record labels had it wrong and that it merely needed to harness P2P's power.