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On Tuesday, March 29, 2005, the US Supreme Court heard the oral arguments for the case of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. This was widely covered in the mainstream news media, as well as all over the Web, but none of the synopses of the case did true justice to the give-and-take of the arguments, as I discovered this week when I stumbled upon a .pdf transcription of the complete oral arguments.

As Jon Iverson points out in another">http://www.stereophile.com/news/041105serving">another posting this week, a surprising number of readers expect downloads to be a viable music acquisition option in the very near future. Perhaps it's closer than we think.

I admit to being a little surprised at the results of our Discs">http://cgi.stereophile.com/cgi-bin/showvote.cgi?403">Discs or Downloads poll a couple of weeks ago. More of you (65%) see a future for downloads as a viable music medium than I would have expected. As reader Mike Garner put it, "As bandwidth and storage continue to become cheaper, audiophile quality music downloads are inevitable." "Downloads save you trips to the shop or having to wait for shipping when you shop online. We'll soon be loading the data into a music server anyway," adds reader Ola Roll.

Just look at the dates and you'll see a legacy that essentially spans the entire history of electrical music reproduction. That's fitting. In his career—or more properly, many careers—Irving M. ("Bud") Fried all but embodied that era.

If you're an audiophile—and let's face it, who else would be reading this—then you know what any hard-core audioweenie would do when visiting a strange city. Visit the hi-fi shops, of course.

When we last">http://stereophile.com/news/011705dorian/">last left them, a troubled Dorian Group had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In mid-January, the company issued a statement indicating that it would liquidate its assets and begin requesting bids for the purchase of the company in a sealed bidding process authorized by the US Bankruptcy Court, Northern New York District.

Yamaha Electronics Corporation has introduced four new A/V digital home-theater receivers equipped with XM Satellite Radio capability (XM-Ready). The $649.95 RX-V757, $549.95 RX-V657, $449.95 RX-V557, and $349.95 RX-V457 will allow users to plug an XM Connect-and-Play home antenna into the Yamaha XM-Ready A/V receiver and activate the XM service to receive 150-plus digital radio channels—no other accessories or installation are required. Using XM's industry-leading chipset technology, as well as a new proprietary chip and signaling protocol, the XM Connect-and-Play home antenna is capable of receiving XM's satellite and terrestrial signals, in addition to performing channel tuning, decoding, and audio transmission functions.