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Joe Abrams has an impressive audio resume. "I've been on the manufacturer's side of the desk since 1979," he says. That's when he started as national sales manager for Monster Cable. A few years later found Abrams as director of sales at Sumiko, and then in 1987 he started as VP of sales at Threshold. In 1991 Abrams joined cable start-up Tara Labs and quickly helped them establish a dealer network before moving on to MIT.

Brian Damkroger finds that the Magnepan">http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/595/">Magnepan Magneplanar MG1.6/QR loudspeaker and a 1973 Porsche 911 have much in common: "Each has grown out of the vision of a single, brilliant designer. Each reflects the long, steady evolution of a basic design, and the consistent focus on a core set of engineering criteria." BD then listens for the fruits of this approach to speaker design and writes up the results.

In his review of the Meridian">http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/590/">Meridian 508.24 CD player, Wes Phillips finds the machine "a beautiful design with impeccable technical credentials—a CD player that belongs, with only a few others, at the very sharpest portion of the leading edge, and that joins them in producing sound that is highly musical and hard to criticize."

Beginning next year, XM">http://www.xmradio.com">XM Satellite Radio won't merely offer 100 channels of news, sports, talk shows, and the entire spectrum of music nationwide. Thanks to a partnership announced May 30 with Command">http://www.commandaudio.com">Command Audio Corporation, XM will allow listeners to personalize their radio programming.

If you think the name Viola Audio Laboratories sounds familiar, wait 'til you hear the names behind it: Tom Colangelo, Paul Jayson, and Tony DiSalvo—all former officers at Cello. Viola, working out of Cello's former New Haven facilities, is now producing a complete line of electronics, from the $18,000 modular Spiritu preamp to the $12,000 Bravo Double Set monoblock amplifier. The company also manufactures audio cables and a modular loudspeaker, the $18,000/pair Allegro, as well as an $18,000 subwoofer, the Basso. The system certainly is elegant-looking, and it sounded impressively coherent in a small hotel room—and that was with both the Allegro's bass module and subwoofer disconnected!

Wandering around the show, we were struck by how good most of the speakers we were hearing were. Not just the cost-no-logic designs, but pretty much all of them. Are we audiophiles lucky or what?

HE 2002's first day was filled with press conferences, but none was more widely anticipated than Sony's. The pre-conference chatter was filled with insiders insisting they positively knew for a fact that Sony was confirming last week's rumor that Universal and Sony were discontinuing CD manufacture in favor of dual-layer SACDs—and also by insiders who insisted it was simply a rumor.

Russia has a new organization that will promote a legitimate music industry and fight industrial piracy, according to mid-May reports from the International">http://www.ifpi.org">International Federation of Phonographic Industries.

Back in 1987, J. Gordon Holt & Martin Colloms set their sights on the Audio">http://www.stereophile.com//amplificationreviews/585/">Audio Research M300 monoblock power amplifier. "After having proven that vacuum tubes could do some sonic things better than transistors, Audio Research is now endeavoring to show that transistors can do most things better than tubes," says JGH, adding that the then-new M300 is a "hybrid amplifier . . . it's half tube, half solid-state."

The music industry was much in the news in late May, with file-sharing lawsuits launched, Web royalties deferred, the payola system attacked, and an artists-and-record labels coalition questioning the homogenization of radio.