LATEST ADDITIONS

Spotting another online niche, <A HREF="http://www.Hifi.com">Hifi.com</A&gt; announced the debut of <A HREF="http://www.CustomHifi.com">CustomHifi.com</A&gt; last week. The new site is aimed at custom installers. HiFi.com claims that CustomHifi.com is the first "comprehensive national, Internet-centric marketplace to offer custom electronic design and installation professionals access to leading audio/video products, information, and installation support."

Bright April Sunday sunshine beams through the bay window of my listening room. The light catches four loudspeakers on stands, two stacks of electronic equipment, a small video monitor, black cables strung behind furniture, and a pile of freshly opened DVDs. I sit in the center in a large, overstuffed chair covered in blue velvet, listening to an array of six loudspeakers and a TV monitor playing The Haunting's DTS soundtrack. The floor rumbles as the sounds of creaking timbers come up from below.

Bonnie and I decided to avoid the crowds last weekend, and instead settled in at home to watch the recent remake of <I>Great Expectations</I>, with Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow. It seemed like a pretty good movie, but before long I found my thoughts drifting to the review I had in progress: my audition and analysis of the Magnepan Magneplanar MG3.6/R. True, <I>Great Expectations</I> is a little slow, and a few explosions or car chases might have better held my attention, but if ever there was an audio product to which the phrase "great expectations" applied, it's the Magnepan 3.6/R.

The public auction of the assets of <A HREF="http://www.wadia.com/">Wadia Digital Corporation</A> has been postponed for at least two weeks, according to an employee of the Minneapolis law firm Siegel, Brill, Greupner, Duffy & Foster, P.A., which is handling the liquidation.

Reader "Bob" says that he'd be very happy to pay for access to a complete Web-based version of <I>Stereophile</I>, and suspects other readers would too. Do you agree that this is a good idea?

E<I>ditor's Note: There is a large contingent of </I>Stereophile<I> readers who design and build their own equipment&mdash;the DIY (do it yourself) crowd. Herv&#233; Del&#233;traz from Switzerland has been e-mailing us photos and stories over the last year about his own ambitious DIY amplifier design, so we asked him if he'd be willing to share a chronicle of his progress, starting from the beginning. This is the first in a six-part series written by Mr. Del&#233;traz.</I>

Late August news bites: <A HREF="http://www.ti.com/">Texas Instruments</A> announced August 25 the completion of its acquisition of chipmaker <A HREF="http://www.burr-brown.com/">Burr-Brown Corporation</A> in a stock swap. Burr-Brown is highly regarded in the audio industry for its low-noise, high-speed digital/analog converters and digital signal-processing (DSP) ICs. The company also makes ultra-high-quality analog components, a segment of the semiconductor industry expected to grow by 25% in the coming year, according to industry analyst Dataquest.