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Once again, audiophiles can help themselves and others at the same time by participating in The Cable Company's seventh annual "Summer Against Hunger" campaign. The">http://www.fatwyre.com">The Cable Company, and several suppliers (listed below) have set up a program by which up to 10% of the Cable Company's August sales are donated to CAREhttp://www.care.org">CARE; and the International">http://www.intrescom.org">International Rescue Committee, with contributions to be used to assist the worldwide disaster relief efforts of those humanitarian organizations.

We start our survey of small speakers with Robert J. Reina's review of the Paradigm">http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/628/">Paradigm Reference Studio/20 loudspeaker. "Impressive right out of the box" is how Reina charaterizes the two-way design, which gets an in-depth review and also a May 2002 followup from Robert Deutsch.

Satellite radio is poised to become a dominant force in the 21st century. Both XM">http://www.xmradio.com">XM Radio and Sirius">http://www.siriusradio.com">Sirius Radio are now in full operation, with subscriptions booming and compatible electronics available at dealers nationwide.

US Senator Joseph Biden has introduced a bill that would give law-enforcement agencies stronger tools to pursue copyright violators, and would give copyright holders stronger grounds for suing pirates.

It's a sobering thought: it was the computer manufacturers and software developers, not the consumer electronics industry, who enabled the biggest audio format since the CD to become popular. The format, which hasn't done much to impress audiophiles, but has greatly enhanced the portability of music, is MP3 and CE manufacturers are only now trying to catch up with products that take advantage of its widespread use.

Love it or hate it, MP3 users are a huge new market, as yet untapped by the music industry. Portable digital compressed-audio players, whether employing Flash memory or compact hard drives à la Apple's iPod, are estimated to begin reaching critical-mass sales numbers around 2006, with an installed base of 24 million units by 2007. Most observers agree that this dramatic growth has been driven, in large part, by the vast quantity of no-fee music that is available in the format, as well as the players' ease of use and flexibility.

Taking the measure of the Chord">http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/624/">Chord Electronics DAC64 D/A processor, John Atkinson finds nice things can come in strange packages. "Such is the pace of development in digital technology these days that it is hard not to become convinced that digital playback is a solved problem." But, as JA discovers, not all solutions are identical.