News

Sirius">http://www.siriusradio.com">Sirius Satellite Radio may be positioned to make the next great leap forward. In mid-May, Kenwoodhttp://www.kenwoodusa.com">Kenwood; and Audiovoxhttp://www.audiovox.com">Audiovox; announced the first transportable receivers, which will let Sirius listeners enjoy the service wherever they go—home, office, boat, beach, etc—not only in the comfort of their cars.

Robert Deutsch warms up the Audiopax">http://www.stereophile.com//amplificationreviews/843/">Audiopax Model Eighty Eight monoblock power amplifier to hear what famed Brazilian designer Eduardo de Lima has to offer. Deutsch notes, "The Audiopax Model Eighty Eight represents the latest refinement of de Lima's thinking about power amplifiers."

Napster may rise from the dead and live again, this time as a commercial venture.

Retail sales of recorded music in the United Kingdom sagged by an unprecedented 13% in the first three months of 2003, according to figures released May 14 by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). British music fans spent £216 million ($351 million) in the first quarter of this year, compared to £249 million ($404.6 million) in the same period a year ago. In unit sales, albums in the UK declined only 4.8% to 44 million, but prices dropped 9.4%. UK album sales totaled £200 million ($324.9 million); singles were off 42%, accounting for only £16.2 million ($26.3 million).

The June issue of Stereophile, which hits newsstands this week, spills some ink on the 30th-anniversary reissue of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon as a two-layer Super Audio CD (Capitol CDP 582136 2). Jon Iverson nominated the disc as June's "Recording of the Month," while I mentioned it in my "As We See It" column. This "fully loaded" SACD includes both multichannel and two-channel mixes encoded with the DSD system on a high-rez SACD layer and a two-channel "Red Book" transfer (16-bit word length, 44.1kHz sampling) on its CD layer.

Satellite radio services appear to be gaining sufficient market momentum to get them over the startup hump.

Several readers have been asking "What's with all of the Musical Fidelity reviews in Stereophile?" Michael Fremer fearlessly wires the Musical">http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/838/">Musical Fidelity Tri-Vista SACD player into his system, noting, "Overachievers tend to rankle people after a while."