The world of loudspeaker aficionados has at one end most of us, who use multi-way box speakers of one kind of another; in the center are the lovers of panels, electrostatic, planar magnetics—it doesn't matter as much as the fact there is no box—and at the extreme other end are the lovers of high-sensitivity designs, where massive amounts of art, artifice, and loving care are applied to wrest full-range sound from a single drive-unit. Overcoming the daunting problems of getting a single drive-unit to work from 20Hz to 20kHz is, by those, felt to be outweighed by the benefits of not having a crossover circuit.

When we awoke on December 30, we found our in-boxes full of emails linking to <I>The Washington Post</I>'s <A HREF="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/28/AR20071… Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use"</A>, which reported that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) were charging that Jeffrey and Pamela Howell's transfer of 2000 legally purchased recordings to his computer as MP3 files represented "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

On December 27, Amazon.com and Warner Music Group announced that WMG's entire 2.9 million-song catalog would be available on Amazon's DRM-free, à la carte MP3 store—the first time the entire Warner catalog has been available online and the first time it has been offered sans DRM.

I first saw the Shure SE530 at the <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2006/010606shure">2006 Consumer Electronics Show</A>, when it was dubbed the E500. The '500 shared the current product's three-armature driver technology and in-ear, sound-isolating, sleeve fitting scheme, but that early prototype seemed almost crude in comparison with the SE530.

I first saw the Shure SE530 at the <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2006/010606shure">2006 Consumer Electronics Show</A>, when it was dubbed the E500. The '500 shared the current product's three-armature driver technology and in-ear, sound-isolating, sleeve fitting scheme, but that early prototype seemed almost crude in comparison with the SE530.