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Nowhere is the inflationary cycle spinning faster than in concert ticket prices. The best tickets for performances by major pop and rock stars this summer will be priced in the low-to-mid hundreds. No, that's not a misprint, and it doesn't include "service charges" and other bogus fees tacked on by ticket agencies. Good seats for Eric Clapton's summer tour will be more than $250 each; similar seating at Simon and Garfunkel's "Old Friends" show at the Hollywood Bowl will go for $700, according to "Parsley, Sage and $350 Seats," a revealing look at skyrocketing ticket prices by Ethan Smith in the May 7 issue of <I>The Wall Street Journal</I>.

<B>HESP&#200;RIAN XXI: <I>Villancicos y Danzas Criollas de la Iberia Antigua al Nuevo Mundo (1550-1750)</I></B><BR>
La Capella Reial de Catalunya, Hesp&#232;rian XXI, Jordi Savall<BR>
Alia Vox CD 9834 (CD). 2004. Nicolas Bartolom&#233;e, prod.; Nicolas de Beco, eng. DDD. TT: 77:03<BR>Performance <B>****&#189;</B><BR>
Sound <B>*****</B>

Nicholas Negroponte, Professor of Media Technology at MIT's Media Lab, is somewhat of a hero of mine, not the least because in his 1995 book <I>Being Digital</I> (Alfred A. Knopf), he mentioned specialty magazines as being a paradigm (of a sort) for the information-rich future. The role of a magazine such as <I>Stereophile</I> is to act as an intelligent (we hope) filter applied to the breadth and depth of human activity. Those who define themselves by their interest in the publication's specialty can therefore go to just one source to find everything of relevance.

The promise of "perfect sound forever," successfully foisted on an unwitting public by the Compact Disc's promoters, at first seemed to put an end to the audiophile's inexorable need to tweak a playback system's front end at the point of information retrieval. Several factors contributed to the demise of tweaking during the period when CD players began replacing turntables as the primary front-end signal source. First, the binary nature (ones and zeros) of digital audio would apparently preclude variations in playback sound quality due to imperfections in the recording medium. Second, if CD's sound was indeed "perfect," how could digital tweaking improve on perfection? Finally, CD players and discs presented an enigma to audiophiles accustomed to the more easily understood concept of a stylus wiggling in a phonograph groove. These conditions created a climate in which it was assumed that nothing in the optical and mechanical systems of a CD player could affect digital playback's musicality.

John Sands wants to know how other <I>Stereophile</I> readers view the state of high-resolution audio.

<I>Stereophile</I> readers are clearly in <A HREF="http://cgi.stereophile.com/cgi-bin/showvote.cgi?327">favor</A&gt; of our <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/digitalsourcereviews/934/">coverage</A&gt; of products like Apple's iPod. But judging by some of the comments we receive, they're split on whether it's been a kick in the pants for music lovers or just added to the downward low-rez spiral of digital audio.

Have you ever been to a rock concert and come away mumbling, "Those engineers must be deaf"? After enduring three hours of an all-out sonic assault, you were probably just a tad cranky, but the facts are that those engineers probably <I>were</I> deaf, or well on their way.