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Jacques Mahul is an interesting, thoughtful man. He's entirely Parisian: international, urbane, and sophisticated. During "HeeFee" '96 in Paris, Kathleen and I sat down with him and spoke about his early years as an audiophile. To accompany <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/273/">my review</A> of the JMlab Utopia, We tried to find out what drives him&mdash;to make the drivers he makes today! I asked him when had it all started:

The performance of deep bass is one of the most perplexing questions we face. Timeless as the search for eternal youth or the meaning of life, the quest for truly satisfying deep bass has engaged generations of philosophers and inventors. Until recently, the subject was primarily one of conjecture, opinion, and hypothesis. Even so, almost no hard science had been devoted to this enduring issue.

A continuation of last week's discussion of low bass. Many audiophiles agree that powerful, well-defined low bass is desirable, but they have many opinions about how to get it.

Telecommunications giant <A HREF="http://www.att.com">American Telephone and Telegraph</A> announced March 16 that it too, now, has technology for digital music delivery. AT&T's system, called <A HREF="http://www.a2bmusic.com">a2b music</A>, is based on MPEG Advanced Audio Coding.

The DVD Forum's Working Group 4 (WG-4) is expected to deliver the "0.9" version of its official DVD-Audio specification this month, with "1.0" to follow shortly. While information is scarce, it appears that WG-4 is talking about four different kinds of disc, each of which will be playable on one or two of three different kinds of players. And that doesn't include Sony's and Philips' "Super Audio CD" proposal (see Peter van Willenswaard's <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10108/">report on SACD</A> a couple of weeks back on the website), or the Classic Records-led "DAD" format, which uses the provision of the DVD-Video specification for 24-bit/96kHz audio data. (DADs will play on DVD-Video players that have appropriate D/A sections---also see the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10072/">past item</A> on the web site.)

<I>Stereophile</I> is, in one sense, like a family&mdash;us younguns have to make do sometimes because the house is straining at the seams. When I first arrived in Santa Fe, for instance, I was told not to come to the office for a few days&mdash;the good news, John Atkinson informed me, was that I had a desk; the bad news was that nobody had a clue where to put it. The dilemma was solved in Solomon-like fashion by shoehorning my desk into the "listening room," which was already serving double-duty as audition space and speaker-measurement lab. If manufacturers visited, we'd sweep up all the acoustic damping from the floor and stash it in JA's office; and if JA needed to take measurements, I would be asked to work at home. It was a manifestly fair solution: inconvenient for everyone involved.

The Lenbrook Group of Pickering, Ontario, Canada announced March 25 that it will acquire <A HREF="http://www.sonicfrontiers.com/">Sonic Frontiers</A> of Oakville, Ontario, Canada. This acquisition, effective May 1, 1998, is an extension of Lenbrook's commitment to enhance its position in the international specialty A/V segment of the consumer electronics industry. A new company, Sonic Frontiers International (SFI), will be formed to leverage Lenbrook's strengths with Sonic Frontiers' market position in the high-end segment of the audio business.