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In an article published on June 28 on the website Slyck.com, a popular site dedicated to news and activism surrounding P2P networks, writer Thomas Mennecke contends that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=1237 ">retooled its "strategy of launching a continuous barrage of monthly lawsuits aimed at approximately 750 individuals," a policy that has resulted in more than 18,000 suits since it was instituted three years ago.

Bob Stuart, chairman and co-founder of Meridian, will deliver a lecture on active loudspeakers to the UK Section of the Audio Engineering Society in London on Tuesday, July 11. Although Bob has been a champion of active speakers for 30 years, he has, surprisingly, delivered only one previous paper on the subject, at the AES UK Conference earlier this year. In this lecture he will expand on that presentation and be able to discuss the topic more fully with the audience.

After I decided to join">http://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/352">join Stereophile as its editor in the spring of 1986, I took a road trip through Europe. The ostensible reason for the trip was to attend a hi-fi show in Lucerne, Switzerland, but the reality was that, faced with the transatlantic dislocation, I wanted to touch base with places that had meant much to me over the preceding years. I took the train to Paris, where I spent a day taking what might have been my last look at the Impressionist paintings (then at the Jeu de Paume gallery, now at the Musée d'Orsay), then drove the rest of the way to Lucerne with KEF's then marketing manager David Inman.

I was saddened to hear of the untimely death of David Smith, vice-president of audio engineering and R&D at Sony Music Studios in New York. David, who was 55, died Saturday June 17, at the home of his mother on Long Island.

It's baaack!

Hansen Audio: Canadian loudspeaker manufacturer Hansen Audio, best known for "high-end luxury lifestyle speakers," has named Wes Bender senior director of US sales and marketing.

When I visitedhttp://stereophile.com/news/051506nht/">visited; NHT's manufacturing facility in early May, I was struck by a comment managing director Chris Byrne made when describing NHT's Xd">http://stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/1105nht/">Xd loudspeaker, which employs sophisticated digital signal processing (DSP) for its crossovers and equalization functions. "You do realize that we could have never incorporated such complex slopes in a physical crossover," Byrne proselytized.