Beginning next year, <A HREF="http://www.xmradio.com">XM Satellite Radio</A> 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 <A HREF="http://www.commandaudio.com">Command Audio Corporation</A>, XM will allow listeners to personalize their radio programming.

In his review of the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/590/">Meridian 508.24 CD player</A>, Wes Phillips finds the machine "a beautiful design with impeccable technical credentials&mdash;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."

<IMG SRC="/images/newsart/he2002.viola.jpg" WIDTH=100 HEIGHT=67 BORDER=0 ALIGN=LEFT>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&mdash;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&mdash;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 <I>all</I> 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&mdash;and also by insiders who insisted it was simply a rumor.

Things seemed to be going well for SACD at the 112th AES Convention, held May 10-13 in Munich. The official news, announced at a Sony-Philips press conference, was that one million consumer SACD players have been sold so far. One large Dutch audio retailer even reported to me that they now sold more SACD players than CD players. The prognosis for SACD is total worldwide sales of 6 million players (in whatever form) in 2003 and 13 million in 2004.

The music industry's worst nightmare is coming true: feeble attempts to shackle compact discs with "protection" are falling prey to simple <A HREF="http://news.com.com/2100-1023-918273.html">felt pen hacks</A>. And it's too late to build use-restriction and tracking technologies directly into CD players and existing computer CD drives.

Used-equipment junkies take note: eBay will bring its popular roving university to New York City for the Home Entertainment 2002 Show (HES 2002), May 30&ndash;June 2, 2002. Since its inception, eBay University has instructed thousands of eBay users on the ins and outs of buying and selling on eBay. The special seminar from eBay at HE 2002 will provide specific tips for attendees on buying and selling consumer electronic products.

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.