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The world of loudspeaker aficionados has at one end most of us, who use multi-way box speakers of one kind of another; in the center are the lovers of panels, electrostatic, planar magnetics—it doesn't matter as much as the fact there is no box—and at the extreme other end are the lovers of high-sensitivity designs, where massive amounts of art, artifice, and loving care are applied to wrest full-range sound from a single drive-unit. Overcoming the daunting problems of getting a single drive-unit to work from 20Hz to 20kHz is, by those, felt to be outweighed by the benefits of not having a crossover circuit.

When we awoke on December 30, we found our in-boxes full of emails linking to The Washington Post's "Download">http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/28/AR20071… Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use", which reported that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) were charging that Jeffrey and Pamela Howell's transfer of 2000 legally purchased recordings to his computer as MP3 files represented "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

On December 27, Amazon.com and Warner Music Group announced that WMG's entire 2.9 million-song catalog would be available on Amazon's DRM-free, à la carte MP3 store—the first time the entire Warner catalog has been available online and the first time it has been offered sans DRM.

MTV published an end of the year review of the music business on December 17, "Madonna">http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1576538/20071214/madonna.jhtml?src=rss… Ditches Label, Radiohead Go Renegade: The Year The Music Industry Broke." Month by month, it's a litany of bad tidings for the biz, from January 14, 2007, the day the Dreamgirls soundtrack hit number 1 on Billboard's pop charts with a scant 60,000 copies sold (lowest #1 ever) through December 3, 2007's announcements that Def Jam and EMI were laying off employees and Warner Music Group would cut executive bonuses (awww).

We received word December 21 that Ultralink/XLO Products executive vice-president Don Bouchard was injured in a "serious motorcycle accident in Texas." Bouchard is currently recovering in a Houston hospital, surrounded by his family, close friends, and business associates. Knowing Don, we're sure that's a packed hospital room.

IRebuildMarantz.com: Robert D. Bowdish sent us an email recently, pointing us to his http://www.irebuildmarantz.com/"> IRebuildMarants.com website, which he describes as "my semi-DYI site that's for the purpose of keeping great vintage audio gear alive."

Lehmann Audio: Immediahttp://www.immediasound.com/">Immedia;, the Berkeley, CA–based distributor of Lyra cartridges, Finite Element stands, Sonics by Joachim Gerhard loudspeakers, and Spiral Groove turntables, has become Lehmann Audio's US distributor.