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Last night I saw him on the stair—
the little man who wasn't there.
I saw him there again today;
oh, how I wish he'd go away.

The most common complaint about record companies: CD prices are too high. In fact, many blame Napster's runaway success on the insistence of "greedy labels" on pricing discs at $15 or higher. Apparently BMG Direct, a division of BMG">http://www.bmg.com/">BMG Entertainment, has put two and two together and found it equals $9.99.

Mastering engineer Denny Purcell let out a long sigh. "Does anyone in this room really believe that any of this is going to do any good?" he asked. Of the eight or nine people—each with decades of experience in the music and/or audio industries—hanging out at Georgetown Masters Studios in Nashville for SDMI's Phase II listening tests, no one said "Yes." The consensus: The watermarking issue will probably be dead and forgotten within a year.

After a difficult gestation, DVD-Audio may finally be moving toward becoming a market reality now that a major record label has stepped forward to support it. Warner">http://www.wmg.com/">Warner Music Group (WMG) has issued several recordings in the new format, covering a range of genres. DVD-A is "the most significant industry format launch since the introduction of the CD nearly 20 years ago," according to an October 2 WMG press release.

Slap echo got you in a flutter? Jonathan Scull writes, in "Fine">http://www.stereophile.com//finetunes/275/">"Fine Tunes" #27, that "last month I delved into avoiding reflective, parallel-wall slap echoes from ruining your audiophile day. But I've since learned of a perfectly useful workaround that's much less costly and involved than horsing around the Sheetrock." George Cardas lends a hand.

You want to grow your market, you've got to plant some seeds. The Consumer">http://www.ce.org/">Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) is doing just that with the BuzzNet">http://www.buzznet.org/">BuzzNet 2000 tour, a traveling educational event that will hit college campuses beginning this month, as reported last">http://www.stereophile.com/news/10859/">last week.

In an unusual move, chipmaker Cirrus">http://www.cirruslogic.com/">Cirrus Logic has purchased patents for Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) technology owned by B&W">http://www2.bwspeakers.com/">B&W Loudspeakers, a leading UK manufacturer. The patents will be used in combination with current Cirrus Logic technology in a new line of digital amplifiers, according to an October 2 news release.