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Recent news from Universal Music Group should bode well for the SACD format. It's not exactly a flood, but the world's largest music company finally made good on the promisehttp://www.stereophile.com/news/11238/">promise; it made at the 2002 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and announced last week its first Super Audio CD (SACD) titles to be released in the United States.

Although the Tweeter">http://www.tweeter.com">Tweeter Home Entertainment Group's rate of expansion has slowed, it shows no sign of stopping. The Canton, MA electronics retailer will open six new stores during the month of November.

Robert Deutsch says, "There is something special about SETs: a kind of midrange magic, a harmonic rightness that tends to elude other amplifier designs." But how to get more power from a single-ended triode design? In his review of the Air">http://www.stereophile.com//amplificationreviews/687/">Air Tight ATM-211 monoblock power amplifier RD discovers one answer.

In August, the future looked cloudy for Sirius">http://www.sirius.com">Sirius Satellite Radio, Inc. Despite the eventual commercial promise of satellite radio, the startup suffered from massive debt accrued during its development and from a slow initial subscription rate. Company officials had discussed a possible">http://www.stereophile.com/news/11421/">possible bankruptcy filing if additional financing couldn't be found.

The release of our 2001 Recommended Components online last month was such a success, we now offer readers the opportunity to buy the 2002 "Recommended Components" from both the April and October issues as .pdf files.

To date, record label attempts at adding copy-control systems to CDs to restrict their use have been less than totally succesful. We've had Sony discs that get">http://www.stereophile.com/news/11341/">get stuck in computers, discs that don't">http://www.stereophile.com/news/11261/">don't reliably play in all CD players, trademark">http://www.stereophile.com/news/11247/">trademark violations, and CDs that generate lawsuitshttp://www.stereophile.com/news/11134/">lawsuits; and consumer frustration from not being able to create a "fair-use" personal copy of a disc to throw in the car.

A long-running dispute between the music industry and small webcasters may have come to an amicable conclusion. Over the weekend of October 5-6, representatives from both sides agreed on a system of royalties to be paid to record labels and artists based on a percentage of webcaster revenue or expenses, rather than on a per song basis. Last summer, Librarian of Congress James Billington decreed that all webcasters should pay a royalty rate of 0.07¢ per song per 1000 listeners. Many small webcasters, including many college radio stations, chose to go offline rather than face fees they couldn't afford.