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Internet music retailer CDnowhttp://www.cdnow.com/">CDnow; has formed a partnership with Sony">http://www.sony.com/">Sony Corporation and Time">http://www.timewarner.com/">Time Warner to build a music and video retailing behemoth. The July 13 announcement came in the wake of online bookseller Amazon.com's">http://www.amazon.com/">Amazon.com's recent move into the music market. With the backing of corporate giants Sony and Time Warner, CDnow could be able to mount a challenge to the growing presence of Amazon, which is also expanding into toy sales and consumer electronics.

One would think that the Internet was growing crowded with online music retailers such as CDnow/N2K, Amazon.com, EveryCD, and Tower Records, just to name a few, all hustling CDs. But the lure of gold in them e-commerce hills is hard to resist. Last week, barnesandnoble.comhttp://barnesandnoble.com">barnesandnoble.com; jumped into the fray and announced the launch of its own Music Store, featuring what the company describes as the first "online classical music superstore." Notably late to market with its online bookselling franchise, barnesandnoble.com hopes to gain ground against arch-rival Amazon.com by expanding beyond books and better focusing on niche markets.

Since the earliest days of stereo—the first experiments with more than single-channel sound happened back in the 1930s—recording and playback have been based on a horizontal model: left-center-right, left-rear, right-rear. "Laterality," as it's sometimes called, can be exploited very well in creating plausible sensations of spatial events, especially by film-industry sound engineers. The believable reproduction of music is considerably more problematic.