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<B>JIMMY SMITH: <I>Dot Com Blues</I></B><BR>Jimmy Smith, Hammond B-3 organ; Russell Malone, Phil Upchurch, guitar; Reggie McBride, electric bass; Harvey Mason, drums; Lennie Castro, percussion. Guest: Dr. John, vocal, piano;, Etta James, vocal; B.B. King, Taj Mahal, vocals, guitars; Keb' Mo,' vocals. Horn section: Darrell Leonard, trumpet, arr.; Oscar Brashear, Leslie Drayton, trumpets; Herman Riley, Joe Sublett, saxes; George Bohanon, Maurice Spears, trombones<BR>Verve 314 549 978-2 (CD). 2000. John Porter, prod.; Rik Pekkonen, eng. DDD. TT: 60:43<BR>Performance <B>****</B><BR>Sonics <B>*****</B>

Those who have read this magazine regularly over the past five years know that Canadian designer Vince Bruzzese has been marketing his small, two-way loudspeakers under the Totem Acoustic brand name. Every review of one of these designs has raved about their strong bass response and three-dimensional imaging, but ends with a "but": "the sound is totally awesome, the imaging is holographic, and my wife thinks it looks terrific in the living room, but..."

Are format wars, such as the battle between DVD-Audio and SACD, worth all the trouble? Some would argue that they let the consumer decide what is best, while others feel that these battles should have been fought in the boardroom and standards committee meetings. What do you think?

In the perfect digital future, audiophiles would be able to drink from the purest of high-resolution audio datastreams with no worry that someone upstream had polluted the current. But in the real world, content providers and hardware manufacturers increasingly conspire to dirty the flow a little and limit unauthorized consumption by controlling the technology needed to filter out their toxic additives.

To balance or not to balance? That is the audio question that Martin Colloms sets out to answer in <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//features/335/">Balance: Benefit or Bluff?</A> Although balanced capability is a fashionable feature in many expensive audio products, Colloms writes that "the High End could be paying dangerous, costly lip service to the received wisdom that balanced operation is the goal for an audio system."

It's a season of mixed results in the electronics industry. On April 9, Peabody, MA&ndash;based <A HREF="http://www.bostonacoustics.com">Boston Acoustics</A> announced that it has slashed jobs due to a slow fourth quarter, reducing its workforce from 389 to 327 as a result of slowing sales. The loudspeaker manufacturer expects earnings of more than $4.2 million for the year ending March 31, a figure that puts the company in a profitable position despite a loss of close to $1 million for the final quarter.

Give an engineering team a blank page and a blank check and there's no telling what they'll come up with. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, for example, one company showed a <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/430/">$25,000 CD transport</A> with laser-pickup mechanism that was separate from its disc drive&mdash;almost the cosmic equivalent of having the sun revolve around the earth.