LATEST ADDITIONS

As any major college dude will tell you, the file-sharing genie can never be put back into the digital audio bottle. But that hasn't stopped the music business from pursuing its scorched-market policy while simultaneously applying various use-restriction technologies to every digital audio format in sight.

On Sunday, December 1, 2002, we celebrated five years of uninterrupted webcasting, our website having emerged from the Internet darkness on December 1, 1997 to become, at least in my eyes, an institution. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that "an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man," and www.stereophile.com is definitely the shadow of erstwhile high-end audio retailer Jon Iverson.

I first heard Eugene Gigout's pipe-organ masterpiece, the Grand Chorus in Dialogue, in the Smetana Concert Hall of Prague's Municipal House (Obecnim Dome) on a Saturday evening before the 2002 flood. I recall seeing the delicate, youthful Michele Hradecka sway from side to side to reach the pedals. In response, a massive wall of deep organ chords shook the hall, the magical acoustic blending the delicate, extended highs with the thunderous bass. But this memory mixed the music with the beauty of Prague's soaring church spires, brilliant red terracotta roofs, and lavish palaces.

I first met NHT co-founder Ken Kantor in 1975 when we were both undergraduates at MIT. Kantor was sponsoring an extracurricular class entitled "Musical Ideas." The concept was to stick a dozen or so musicians in a classroom for free improvisation and hope to create music à la Miles Davis' Bitches Brew. The result was a mess; although talented guitarist Kantor meant well, there was no common vision or consistency of musical talent. Nevertheless, I had a blast trying to simulate a tamboura drone with a Hohner Clavinet, phase shifter, and volume pedal.