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<B>TRIO MEDIAEVAL: <I>Words of The Angel</I></B><BR> <B>Anonymous</B>: <I>Messe de Tournai</I>. <B>Moody</B>: <I>Words of The Angel</I>. Misc. 13th-century monophonic and 14th-century polyphonic works. Trio Mediaeval: Anna Maria Friman, Linn Andrea Fuglseth, Torunn &#216;strem Ossum, sopranos<BR> ECM 1753 (CD). 2001. John Potter, prod.; Peter Laenger, eng. DDD. TT: 65:45<BR> Performance <B>*****</B><BR> Sonics <B>*****</B>

No doubt about it&mdash;Linn's top-of-the-line Komri loudspeaker is a queer-lookin' duck. It's a large, boxy thing, fairly deep, and weighing a hefty 176 lbs, including the base. Whew. I'll put it this way: rap your knuckles, break your hand.

Sometimes, taking what looks like the easy route turns out to be a bust. The line for cabs outside the Alexis Park Resort Hotel in Las Vegas, home of the high-end audio exhibits at the 2002 Consumer Electronics Show, must have been at least 50 people long. So much for the post-9/11 forecasts of doom that had preceded the convention: last fall's Comdex may have been a bust, but the official <A HREF="http://www.ce.org">CES visitor count</A> of 100,307, if a little lower than the past two years' attendances, still seemed respectable (and surpassed 1999's total of 97,370).

Analog audio electronics are approaching "maturity," a state eventually achieved by most technologies, in which almost all the great discoveries have been made and progress becomes a process of increasingly arcane refinements. Digital audio is in no such danger, as evidenced by three new product announcements made the first week of April.

In a never-ending quest to control what it believes is an epidemic of piracy, the music industry in recent years has gone after Internet file-sharing startups, fly-by-night CD duplicators, foreign pirates operating on an industrial scale, college kids with too much time on their hands, and street-corner vendors hawking badly-duped cassettes. At times the anti-piracy campaign has reached the fervor of a witch hunt, with blame laid on the innocent as well as the guilty.

Back in September of 1986, the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/550/">KEF R107 loudspeaker</A> represented the flagship of KEF's much admired Reference Series. Dick Olsher and a variety of other <I>Stereophile</I> scribes profile this important audio achievement over the course of five years, wrapping up with Tom Norton's 1995 review of the R107/2 "Raymond Cooke Signature Edition."

You have to wonder what Sony is thinking. The <A HREF="http://www.sonystyle.com/vaio/digitalstudio/index.shtml">product copy</A> claims that the new Sony "VAIO Digital Studio" computer is the company's "incredible computing and entertainment hybrid combining television, recording, playback and even music." Oooops. Forget about that music part, especially if you purchase Sony Music's latest Celine Dion CD.