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Sam Tellig loves 'em and consistently sings their high-quality/low-buck praises as a cheapskate favorite ($6.99 per CD!). And now, classical music label Naxos">http://www.naxos.com">Naxos of America is blazing new paths with its announcement last week that it and Liquid">http://www.liquidaudio.com">Liquid Audio have inked an agreement to digitally distribute downloads of selected Naxos recordings to leading retail and music web sites in the Liquid Music Network.

While audiophiles obsess about extracting another iota of resolution from our already high-rez systems and recordings, the rest of the world is going crazy for portable music.

In his review of the Soliloquy">http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/459/">Soliloquy 5.3 loudspeaker, Kalman Rubinson says that when he heard a pair, his first thoughts were, "Gotta get my hands on these!" After careful listening, did the speaker live up to Rubinson's first impressions? KR tells the whole story.

George Harrison, the youngest Beatle, and the least comfortable with the band's renown, died November 29 at 58, following a battle with cancer. Harrison, one of rock's most distinctive guitarists, was also a songwriter and singer of the first water. It could be said that it was his misfortune to be the third songwriter in a band that featured the two most significant tunesmiths of his era. On the other hand, without Harrison's unique, exquisitely tasteful, musically wide-ranging guitar playing—which, in its consistent submission to the requirements of the individual songs, rarely drew attention to itself—Lennon and McCartney might have just been another band.

Jonathan Scull takes a gander at the dCS">http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/454/">dCS Purcell D/D converter, and tries to make sonic sense out of the merits of upsampling. Scull writes, "So while the true differences between upsampling and oversampling remain murky, my pleasant mission is to report on the sound of the Purcell and compare it to the latest version of the pro-audio version, the 972."

Record label attempts at restricting the potential uses of their CDs have hit another bump in the antipiracy road. Music label BMG had announced earlier this year that it would try to find ways to restrict its CDs, in an effort to stem piracy and the trading of MP3 files. But those plans appear to have backfired, so far.

Citing poor sales in North and South America, EMIhttp://www.emigroup.com">EMI; reported that it lost $77.6 million during the first six months of its business year, ended September 30, compared to a loss of $44.3 million for the same period last year.