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Federal courts long ago established that music fans have certain "fair use" rights when it comes to making copies of recordings they own. They can transfer recordings from one format to another—such as from LP to cassette tape or from CD to MiniDisc—and they can share those recordings with others, provided that the results are only for private, noncommercial use.

Editor's Note: Richard Hess has recently spent time remastering several CDs and wrote about the experience for an engineering newsgroup. We think Stereophile's online readers will find his comments about the process interesting.

Kalman Rubinson had tried to get his hands on the Revel Performa F30 loudspeakers back in January 1999, but was thwarted until later in the year, when J-10 decided to send them his way. Kal was clearly excited about these speakers, and explains in detail exactly why.

The bad news for the music industry: Teenagers bought less music last year, according to a recently released survey commissioned by the Recording Industry Association of America. The good news: Middle-aged folks bought more, according to the same survey.

DVD-Audio has been "almost here" for so many months that it seemed almost anticlimactic when the first players finally emerged on dealer shelves this week. Late in May of this year, Panasonic announced (see previous story) that they would be releasing two players, one under the Panasonic banner and the other under the company's Technics brand, in July. It looks as if they've finally made good on their promise.

One can almost imagine how it all started: "Hey, you got a computer in my audio system." "No, you got an audio system in my computer . . . "

Back when DVD players were first released in the US, Classic Records was among the first companies to exploit the fact that early machines, though intended for the video enthusiast, could play a 24-bit/96kHz audio recording as well as movies (see previous story). These early high-resolution discs, which Classic called DADs, were intended to hold us over until DVD-Audio (then thought to be just around the corner) would finally hit the market. More than two years later we're still waiting for DVD-A, but Classic intends to be ready when it finally appears.