For Martin Luther King day, here's John Coltrane's haunting "Alabama," which, according to Sascha Feinstein and Craig Werner, was based on the rhythms of the eulogy Martin Luther King delivered at the funeral for the four girls slain when their church was dynamited in Birmingham.
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Boy, this is great writing tempered by knowledge and experience.

<B>Big Trends:</B><BR>
<I>Wireless Speakers</I>&mdash;except that they replace the speaker wire with an AC cord, so you come out kind of even.<BR>
<I>Music Servers</I>&mdash;of course it's the sound that matters, but the interface is what will make the difference. Sooloos leads the way.<BR>
<I>Apple iPhone</I>&mdash;it's wireless and an iPod. This means your remote can now be your music library too. This will sink in soon, and audiophile WiFi will take off.

On our last News Desk post of 2006, we reported that an anonymous hacker called Muslix64 had announced that he had <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/010107hacked/">cracked</A&gt; the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) digital rights management (DRM) scheme. Muslix64 said he'd release more details (and decryption software) on January 2. That software, called BackupHDDVD, is now available <A HREF="http://rapidshare.com/files/8318838/BackupHDDVD.zip.html%22">online</A&…; and the Internets have been all atwitter about it, with charges ranging from "bogus!" to "hallelujah!"

As regular magazine readers may know, I have not succumbed to the blandishments of surround-sound in my own listening room. But I still look at Shows for that convincingly magic experience. Listening to Ray Kimber's four-channel Isomike recordings in his 35th-floor <A HREF="http://blog.stereophile.com/ces2007/107nowthats/">room at the Venetian</A> was indeed magic, though that was due in large part to his DSD-encoded masters capturing the appropriate spatial information. But across the hall, TAD was showing off a surround system comprising five of its Reference One speakers ($60,000/pair), driven by Pass Labs amps with a variety of commercial recordings, from two-channel to multichannel on SACD.

For far longer than I've been attending the January Consumer Electronics Show (CES), it has overlapped with the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo. Indeed, in the old days when the high-end portion of CES was housed in the Sahara hotel and casino, the two shows shared the same venue, leading to one of the more bizarre culture collisions known to modern man (one was certainly never in doubt as to who was there for which show).

The penultimate night of CES is traditionally the night of the industry party thrown by <I>Stereophile</I> and <I>Home Theater</I> magazines&mdash;the 2007 CES saw the event taking place at Le Cirque club at the Paris Hotel. The good and great in high-end audio can be seen in the photograph and while we will not be giving points for identifying guests, we will kick the game off by pointing to Arcam founder John Dawson, in the white shirt ordering drinks from the bar at the top left. (A larger version of the photograph is posted in our <A HREF="http://forum.stereophile.com/photopost/showphoto.php/photo/1073">website photo gallery</A>.)