LATEST ADDITIONS

Music lovers who availed themselves of <A HREF="http://www.mp3.com/">MP3.com</A>'s uploading-archiving-and-accessing services are about to become the next target market for the music industry. Nearing the end of protracted litigation brought against it by the music industry's "Big Five," the online music venture has announced a marketing service that will promote new commercial recordings directly to its users through e-mails. The recordings will be on labels under the control of MP3.com's opponents in the year-long copyright wrangle.

E<I>ditor's Note: This is Part Two of a six-part series from reader Herv&#233; Del&#233;traz of Switzerland, who is chronicling the development of his DIY (do-it-yourself) audio amplifier. (Part One is <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10825/">here</A&gt;.)</I>

Dynaudio US's president, Al Filippelli, tells Wes Phillips that "Dynaudio speakers are a lot like the Danes who make them. They don't look all that fancy, but they tell the truth and they get the job done. To a lot of audiophiles, that's boring. But there are a lot of people who have been looking for those qualities in a loudspeaker, and for them, boring can be cause for excitement." Phillips takes an in-depth look at the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/262/">Dynaudio Contour 3.3 loudspeaker</A> to determine if "boring" can make <I>him</I> happy.

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?