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Hard as it is to believe, next year will be the 40th anniversary of Stereophile's famed "Recommended Components" feature. J. Gordon Holt first set the list to paper when the Beatles were first breaking big in the US, and its April and October appearances have stood as biannual audiophile institutions ever since.

It is shaping up as one of the big battles of the 21st century: content owners (who are not necessarily the artists who create content) versus the consumer electronics industry. On the one hand you have Hollywood with its record companies and the RIAA, and on the other, the manufacturers of products and technologies that facilitate the manipulation and use of digital content.

Red">http://www.RedRoseMusic.com">Red Rose Music is celebrating the launch of its Chicago store with a grand opening bash Thursday, September 26.

An expanded alliance between one of the High End's most respected speaker manufacturers and one of the most aggressive upscale retailers should bode well for both partners—and for music lovers nationwide.

As the saying goes, there are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics. Statistics can be used to help understand what goes on in the world, but, as any marketing exec or PR company knows, they can also be manipulated to tell a particular story.

On Wednesday, September 11, the National">http://www.nab.org">National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) filed a brief with the U.S. Copyright Office seeking relief from the implementation of a webcasting royalty schedule announced this summer by the Librarian of Congress, James Billington. In June, Billington determined that commercial stations streaming their musical programming on the Internet should pay a rate of .07 cents per song per 1000 listeners, a rate less than half that suggested by the music industry–backed Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel.

Chip manufacturer Cirrus">http://www.cirrus.com">Cirrus Logic announced last week that it has introduced two audio, high-performance, digital-to-analog converters (DACs) that it claims will enable manufacturers to bring more DVD-Audio players to the mainstream consumer market.