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"I wouldn't characterize my life as 'a search for bigger and better toys,' but I am intrigued by interesting things—like the Impact">http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/648/">Impact Airfoil 5.2 loudspeaker system," says Brian Damkroger as he steels himself for another review. BD goes in search of an answer to the Airfoil dilemma: "big toy, new toy, neat toy, better toy?"

Traditional music radio has been taking a beating since the mid '80s, when declining audience numbers entered a ratings freefall. Reader Bard-Alan Finlan argued in his Soapboxhttp://www.stereophile.com/showsoap.cgi?276">Soapbox; a few weeks back that perhaps digital radio could cure the market's over-the-air terrestrial broadcast ills, if only it were implemented with adequate bandwidth and marketed correctly.

Sharp">http://www.sharp-usa.com">Sharp Electronics has come a long way from the household appliances and modest home entertainment products it has long been famous for. (The company's name derives from its first product, a retracting pencil.) Sharp is making a serious, prolonged push into upscale audio and video, as evidenced by the array of new models on display at a dealer and media conference held in late August at the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines, a hotel/golf resort north of San Diego.

All of us at Stereophile were saddened to learn of the death of mastering engineer Denny Purcell, whose body was found Thursday, August 22 in the offices of his Georgetown Masters studio in Nashville. He was 51.

Less than a week after launching major copyright-infringement litigationhttp://www.stereophile.com/news/11422/">litigation; against several large Internet service providers (ISPs), member companies of the Recording">http://www.riaa.com">Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) abruptly withdrew their lawsuit because an offending offshore music site had even more abruptly gone dark.

The music industry's anti-piracy war took a new turn August 16, when a coalition of major record labels filed suit against several large Internet service providers in the hope of blocking access to an offshore free music site.

John Atkinson gets his hands on "the very strange-looking" MBL">http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/643/">MBL 111B loudspeaker to determine how "upper-frequency drive-units resembling an array of orange segments" could possibly sound. As JA discovers, thinking different can sometimes be a plus.