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When CDs were becoming popular, Neil Young made no secret of his disdain for the sound of digital. Interviews from the period quoted him as saying that the sound "left him cold," and he would rather listen to an LP, thank you very much. To this day, his new CD releases also appear on vinyl, but with the advent of DVD-Audio, sampling and quantization rates have improved—enough, apparently for Mr. Young's approval.

For the music industry, copyright and royalty litigation is like an endless war fought on many fronts. During early November, as four of the industry's "Big Five" continued their pursuit of the file-sharing service Napster, a parallel trial in US Federal Court in New York against music archiving-and-accessing site MP3.com by Universal Music Group entered its penalty phase, that segment of the proceeding in which aggrieved plaintiffs seek to extract money from guilty defendants. Other plaintiffs in the trial—Sony Music Entertainment, BMG, Warner Music, and EMI—have all settled with the San Diego-based Internet service for an average of $20 million each.

Larry Greenhill writes: "I can't resist reading about a company's flagship loudspeaker—the price-no-object product that embodies the most advanced ideas from a company's research and design department . . . The cost? Don't ask." Six years in development, the Dynaudio Evidence loudspeaker is just such a cutting-edge product. So, Greenhill explains, "when the opportunity arose to review the Evidence, the flagship speaker from Danish company Dynaudio, I eagerly agreed." His verdict awaits.

At least one media conglomerate has seen the light. In a surprise move, German giant Bertelsmann AG broke ranks with the music industry and settled its copyright-infringement lawsuit with embattled Napster, in effect becoming the startup's tentative partner. The deal, reached on October 31, could mark the real beginning of the music industry's move into the Internet age. Bertelsmann is the parent organization of Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG), one of the world's major music labels, as well as online music retailer CDnow.