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Let's do the It's a Wonderful Life exercise, shall we? Imagine what popular music would sound like today without Jerry Wexler. Aretha Franklin would have never returned to her gospel roots, Ray Charles would have continued imitating Charles Brown and Nat Cole, Stax would have been a tiny regional record label, and denatured white covers of R&B songs would dominate the charts. In fact, the music we know today as rhythm and blues would still be called "race music"—Wexler having coined R&B while working at Billboard in 1949.

As it has for the last 12 years, The">http://www.thecableco.com/">The Cable Company, along with many of its vendors, is dedicating August to help some of "the poorest people in the most ravaged regions of the world."

PSB came to New York in late July to debut its new line of loudspeakers, giving journos an advance peek at them before the official launch at the CEDIA Conference in early September. Paul">http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/231/">Paul Barton, showing a lot of emotion for a normally reserved Canadian, was frankly in love with the four new loudspeakers.

T.H.E. Show, aka The">http://theshowlasvegas.com/2009/">The Home Entertainment Show, has put out a welcome mat for members of "authentic Audiophile Societies throughout the globe."1 Scheduled for January 9–11, 2009, in Las Vegas, the same dates as the Consumer Electronics Show down the road, T.H.E. Show has for the first time offered members of audiophile societies paid access to over 100 anticipated active-display suites in both the St. Tropez and Alexis Park hotels.

On June 11, Recording Industry vs the People, Ray Beckerman's popular blogspot site covering the recording industry's ongoing series of litigations, revealed that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) had voluntarily and "without prejudice" filed a motion on May 27 to dismiss its ongoing complaint, Warner v Cassin, which maintained that posting files to a peer-to-peer network was distribution of those files, whether or not actual distribution occurred. This is known in copyright law as "making available."

It has been an action packed week on the judicial copyright battlefield. One June 11, a federal">http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/umg_v_augusto/LA07CV03106SJO-O.pdf">f… district court upheld the first">http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/08/first-sale-why-it-matters-why-were… sale doctrine , ruling in UMG v Troy Augusto that sales of promotional CDs did not constitute a copyright violation.

Some musicians are remembered for a single remarkable album; some are remembered for a hit song—Bo Diddley will always be remembered for a beat. That eponymous beat—a rhumba-inflected Bomp a-bomp-a-bomp, bomp, bomp—may well have been "the most plagiarized rhythm in rock," as Rolling Stone claimed in 2005.

Sometimes, wonderful things go unnoticed. Thus did Stereophile miss that, in June 2007, at its 31st annual conference, in London, UK, the International Audio Engineering Society issued two Awards of Excellence in the category of Professional Engineering. One, which we learned about from a Minnetonka Audio press release, went to Dorian Records (see the May 2008 issue of Stereophile, pp.14–15). The other went to AIX">http://www.aixrecords.com">AIX Records of Southern California. The award is for John Gorka's The Gypsy Life, one of more than 50 high-resolution recordings available from AIX in DVD-Audio/Video surround sound and on two-channel CD. Most interesting is that both AES awards were for DVD-Audio projects.

Steinway Musical Instruments, Inc. announced May 19 that it was acquiring online classical retailer ArkivMusic, LLC for $3 million in cash at closing and three annual payments of $500,000.

We have written about HDTracks.com previouslyhttp://www.stereophile.com/news/032308hdtracks/">previously;, but that was before the site went public. This morning David Chesky notified Stereophile that it is offering, for a limited time, a free "HDTracks">https://www.hdtracks.com/index.php?file=register">"HDTracks Ultimate Download Experience."