MIT Media Lab has posted a survey seeking to discover "what words people use to describe sounds—and whether everyone uses a common vocabulary, or whether the choice of words is related to a person's musical or cultural background—and how the chosen words relate to a sound's timbral characteristics."

Subway maps of the world, rendered to scale. Why do I link to that? Because it's got subways . . . and maps . . . and, uh, scale.

<I>Spinner</I> picks 'em. Yeah, it's a list, but this one has the songs embedded, so you can hear the ones you don't know&mdash;or the ones you love, for that matter.

John Mitchell, an outside counsel for the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM), warns that Florida and Utah have passed second-hand goods legislation (familiarly known as "pawn-shop laws") that could make the buying and selling of used CDs extremely unprofitable for stores and inconvenient for consumers trying to unload music they no longer wish to own.

It began with an email from reader Ed Hoffman. "I was looking for a Pass Labs dealer and found out that Pass Labs has dumped all of their dealers around the country. Do you have any information about what is going on?"

Internet radio streams have received a reprieve from the US Copyright Review Board (CRB) decision to <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/news/042307net/">restructure the royalty fees</A> for the format. In March, the CRB established fees, effective retroactively to the beginning of 2006, that would be ramped up each year through 2010, with a cost of 0.08&#162; per performance (per listener) in 2006, going up to 0.11&#162; in 2007; 0.14&#162; in 2008; 0.18&#162; in 2009; and 0.19&#162; in 2010.