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Many audiophiles spend thousands on state-of-the-art audio equipment, but does it really put you in the room with the performers?

Fiscal year 1998 will be one of diminished expectations for <A HREF="http://www.harman.com">Harman International Industries</A>, Chairman Dr. Sidney Harman announced last week to assembled analysts and fund managers at a meeting in New York. He laid much of the blame on the continuing economic slump in Asia.

Digital radio company <A HREF="http://www.worldspace.com/">American Mobile Radio Corporation</A> announced last Wednesday that it has exercised a $52.9 million option to upgrade its satellites. The move will potentially double the channel capacity of AMRC's nationwide satellite-direct audio radio service (SDARS), scheduled for the year 2000.

The "world's largest bookstore" may be on its way to becoming one of the biggest music stores, too. Two weeks ago, <A HREF="http://www.amazon.com">Amazon.com</A&gt; began a big push into CD retailing, more than doubling the number of its musical offerings to over 100,000 titles. (Competitor <A HREF="http://www.cdnow.com">CDnow</A&gt; offers over 500,000 titles.) Visitors to the Amazon website can now click on a tab that will take them to a new music site, where they can listen to audio previews and read reviews, reprints of articles on bands and musicians, and music-industry news.

With the plethora of CD and DVD formats out there, it can be confusing figuring out what will work with what. Standards can help define specifications for a particular format, but often do little to guarantee compatibility between them.

With the single-ended triode resurgence of recent years causing much debate about tubes vs. transistors, what has been your experience?

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