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Beginning next year, XM">http://www.xmradio.com">XM Satellite Radio won't merely offer 100 channels of news, sports, talk shows, and the entire spectrum of music nationwide. Thanks to a partnership announced May 30 with Command">http://www.commandaudio.com">Command Audio Corporation, XM will allow listeners to personalize their radio programming.

If you think the name Viola Audio Laboratories sounds familiar, wait 'til you hear the names behind it: Tom Colangelo, Paul Jayson, and Tony DiSalvo—all former officers at Cello. Viola, working out of Cello's former New Haven facilities, is now producing a complete line of electronics, from the $18,000 modular Spiritu preamp to the $12,000 Bravo Double Set monoblock amplifier. The company also manufactures audio cables and a modular loudspeaker, the $18,000/pair Allegro, as well as an $18,000 subwoofer, the Basso. The system certainly is elegant-looking, and it sounded impressively coherent in a small hotel room—and that was with both the Allegro's bass module and subwoofer disconnected!

Wandering around the show, we were struck by how good most of the speakers we were hearing were. Not just the cost-no-logic designs, but pretty much all of them. Are we audiophiles lucky or what?

Russia has a new organization that will promote a legitimate music industry and fight industrial piracy, according to mid-May reports from the International">http://www.ifpi.org">International Federation of Phonographic Industries.

Back in 1987, J. Gordon Holt & Martin Colloms set their sights on the Audio">http://www.stereophile.com//amplificationreviews/585/">Audio Research M300 monoblock power amplifier. "After having proven that vacuum tubes could do some sonic things better than transistors, Audio Research is now endeavoring to show that transistors can do most things better than tubes," says JGH, adding that the then-new M300 is a "hybrid amplifier . . . it's half tube, half solid-state."

Used-equipment junkies take note: eBay will bring its popular roving university to New York City for the Home Entertainment 2002 Show (HES 2002), May 30–June 2, 2002. Since its inception, eBay University has instructed thousands of eBay users on the ins and outs of buying and selling on eBay. The special seminar from eBay at HE 2002 will provide specific tips for attendees on buying and selling consumer electronic products.

The music industry's worst nightmare is coming true: feeble attempts to shackle compact discs with "protection" are falling prey to simple felt">http://news.com.com/2100-1023-918273.html">felt pen hacks. And it's too late to build use-restriction and tracking technologies directly into CD players and existing computer CD drives.