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Retail sales of recorded music in the United Kingdom sagged by an unprecedented 13% in the first three months of 2003, according to figures released May 14 by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). British music fans spent £216 million ($351 million) in the first quarter of this year, compared to £249 million ($404.6 million) in the same period a year ago. In unit sales, albums in the UK declined only 4.8% to 44 million, but prices dropped 9.4%. UK album sales totaled £200 million ($324.9 million); singles were off 42%, accounting for only £16.2 million ($26.3 million).

The June issue of Stereophile, which hits newsstands this week, spills some ink on the 30th-anniversary reissue of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon as a two-layer Super Audio CD (Capitol CDP 582136 2). Jon Iverson nominated the disc as June's "Recording of the Month," while I mentioned it in my "As We See It" column. This "fully loaded" SACD includes both multichannel and two-channel mixes encoded with the DSD system on a high-rez SACD layer and a two-channel "Red Book" transfer (16-bit word length, 44.1kHz sampling) on its CD layer.

Audiophiles will get a rare opportunity to discover the similarities and differences between SACD reproduction and the real thing at this year's <A HREF="http://www.homeentertainment-expo.com">Home Entertainment 2003</A> show in San Francisco. <A HREF="http://www.diversityrecords.net">Diversity Records, Ltd.</A> has announced it will record two performances by its artists at HE2003 on June 7 (1&ndash;4:30pm).

Several readers have been asking "What's with all of the Musical Fidelity reviews in <I>Stereophile</I>?" Michael Fremer fearlessly wires the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/838/">Musical Fidelity Tri-Vista SACD player</A> into his system, noting, "Overachievers tend to rankle people after a while."

Overachievers tend to rankle people after a while. Musical Fidelity, a relatively small British company run by Antony Michaelson, has issued a stream of high-performance, high-value electronic products over the past few years, along with a limited-edition line of pricier designs based on the military-spec nuvistor vacuum tube. With few exceptions, Musical Fidelity products have garnered outstanding reviews worldwide, with consumer acceptance to match. Michaelson is also an accomplished clarinetist, recording and issuing classical-music CDs in his "spare" time.

With hindsight, one of the sideways steps taken by the High End in the early 1990s was the splitting of CD players into separate transports and processors. There were good reasons for this development, not the least of which was the flowering of creativity it engendered in high-end audio engineers. Having open access to the digital audio data also made possible effective digital equalizers and room-correction processors, but in the rush to increase a system's component count, it was overlooked for too long that keeping everything in one box offered certain advantages.

I was in a jam. John Atkinson was gently reminding me of rapidly approaching deadlines, and my longtime reference CD player, the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/343/">Simaudio Moon Eclipse</A>, had just been recalled for an upgrade. This wouldn't normally have been a problem, but I was also in the middle of relocating from New Mexico to California, and all of my backup gear was either in storage or on a moving truck somewhere.