LATEST ADDITIONS

Back in my bass-player days in the 1970s, I used to do a regular cabaret gig, providing musical support for sundry British stand-up comic acts. I flashed back on those days when I recently watched <I>Fierce Creatures</I>, the John Cleese/Jamie Lee Curtis/Kevin Kline/Michael Palin vehicle, on satellite. There, playing the part of a zookeeper, was pint-size comedian Ronnie Corbett, whom I backed a few times. (He always bought the band a bottle of Scotch&mdash;you remember stuff like that!) Ronnie used to open his act with the old "They said Thomas Edison was crazy...they said Henry Ford was crazy...they said Albert Einstein was crazy..." gag, which ends with "They said my Uncle Charlie was crazy...actually, my Uncle Charlie <I>was</I> crazy!"

Many audiophiles are also record collectors. There are many ways to add to your collection. Which one works for you?

Questions for music lovers: 1) Have you been racking your brain trying to remember who recorded <I>Ruby Vroom</I>? 2) Do you know how many Tim Hardin recordings are available on CD? 3) Which album featured Head East's "Never Been Any Reason," considered by some connoisseurs the greatest rock song ever?

Specialty audio manufacturers did better than expected in 1997, with factory sales as high as $1.4 billion, as reported <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10148/">last week</A>. More figures from the <A HREF="http://www.cema.org">Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association</A> indicate that the High End's good fortune is part of a bigger trend.

Do offensive lyrics in pop music contribute to violent behavior and teen suicide? Some lawmakers believe so, and think public investment in the entertainment business is immoral.

On April 15, <A HREF="http://www.ascap.com/">ASCAP</A&gt; (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), the music performing-rights organization, and <A HREF="http://www.liquidaudio.com">Liquid Audio</A>, a developer of secure online music delivery systems, announced a strategic alliance to protect ownership of music on the Internet. According to a Liquid Audio press release, the initiative encourages, streamlines, and simplifies music-rights licensing and reporting, and will benefit website creators as well as music writers, publishers, and composers.

Everyone claims "CD-quality" sound over the Internet these days, but the reality always seems far short of that promise. As a result, work continues to develop an encoding scheme worthy of the CD-quality title. Recently we <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10133/">reported</A&gt; on developments at <A HREF="http://www.att.com">AT&T</A&gt; regarding the <A HREF="http://www.a2bmusic.com">a2b</A&gt; format, and both <A HREF="http://www.liquidaudio.com">Liquid Audio</A> and <A HREF="http://www.realnetworks.com">RealNetworks</A&gt; compete on a weekly basis to grab headlines for their audio technology announcements.