Peeking out from the edge of this gigantic 14ft<SUP>2</SUP> panel at the Roy Bird Show, veteran retailer and audio writer Howard Popeck has taken on this distribution of the Podium 1, and told me that its inventors and makers wished to remain anonymous. Further investigation unearthed the information that Paul Burton (responsible for the early-‘90s Sumo speaker and in part the Cyrus NXT-hybrid design) is involved, and close inspection suggests that a very large NXT panel lies at the core. The good news is that it's only around &#189;" deep around the edge (with a bulging rib, presumably covering the actuators, down the spine); it will cost a relatively modest &#163;3000&ndash;4000/pair with a money-back-if-not-satisfied guarantee; and it delivers a sound with a very generous and convincing sense of scale. Bass might have been tauter (but the room was really much too small for such large panels), and imaging seemed a bit vague (as one might expect), but its ability to generate impressive dynamics was both intriguing and very persuasive indeed.

Herv&#233; D&#233;l&#233;traz, proprietor and inventor of the rather wonderful Dartzeel amplifiers, and possessor of a great sense of humor, did his best to explain at the Roy Bird Show the operational improvements in the now electronically encoded preamp volume control.

Vivid Audio's stylish speaker range, made in South Africa and engineered by ex-B&W designer Laurence Dickie, is expanding. A compact stand-mount (right), available in two sizes with bass alignment for either boundary or free space siting, has now joined the original B1 (left) and larger K1 models. Vivid speakers were demmed at the Roy Bird Show and are distributed in the US by Musical Surroundings.

Apogee fans will be delighted to hear that the legendary full-range ribbon is back&mdash;only it's now manufactured in Queensland, Australia by English immigrant Graeme Keet. Universally known as Graz, he's been in Oz for 18 years, and started offering a repair service for Apogee owners when the company went out of business. He then introduced the Perigee hybrid ribbon models, has now worked out a way of mechanising ribbon production and is putting the Synergy model (shown here at the Roy Bird Show) into production, with a UK pricetag of &#163;13,000/pair ($24,500). The sound in the undamped dem room did seem rather bright, but Graz claims to have achieved dramatic improvements in efficiency over the original Apogees. He can also make replicas of the original models if requested.

The Philadelphia Orchestra, one of America's prestigious "Big Five" orchestras, has established its own <A HREF="http://www.thephiladelphiaorchestra.com/">digital online music store</A> to directly market its soundboard recordings of current Philadelphia Orchestra performances.

We all know the refrain. Classical music is losing its audience. With shorter attention spans, the ascent of the iPod, a penchant for music (and spoken word masquerading as music) in the background, and the submergence of audio by home theater, fewer and fewer people in the United States are being exposed to art music of the past and present.