In his January "Sam's Space" column, while writing about the system he used with Sutherland's Director line stage (p.32), Sam Tellig wrote "For the most part, I used now-discontinued XLO interconnects and speaker cables. XLO itself has been discontinued, alas. I do miss its founder, Roger Skoff."

We've reported many times on the mass lawsuits filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against individuals or institutions that it alleges are illegally participating in peer-to-peer file-sharing activities, so we felt it only fair to report on a lawsuit where the trade group is being sued. Actually, the RIAA's <I>attorneys</I> are being sued by James and Angela Nelson, who were themselves the target of <I>Motown v. Nelson</I>, which alleged that the couple had allowed an employee of Ms. Nelson's home-run daycare center to access P2P websites from their computer.

Sony BMG has agreed to settle a NY-based group action lawsuit triggered by the company's use of two different digital rights management (DRM) technologies. <A HREF="http://www.sunbelt-software.com/ihs/alex/sonysettleme23423423434nt.pdf"… here</A> to download a .pdf version of the 42-page <I>Motion and Memorandum of Law in Support of Plaintiff's Application for Preliminary Approval of Class Action Settlement</I>.

In 1966, two avid audiophile/music lovers&mdash;a nuclear physicist named Arnold Nudell and an airline pilot named Cary Christie&mdash;labored over weekends and evenings for 18 months in Nudell's garage to put together the world's first hybrid electrostatic/dynamic loudspeaker system. It cost them $5000 for materials, launched a company (New Technology Enterprises), and helped contribute to the popular myth that all of the really <I>important</I> audiophile manufacturers got started in somebody's basement or garage (footnote 1). The system was marketed as the Servo-Statik I, for the princely sum of $1795. (At the time, the most expensive loudspeaker listed in <I>Stereo Review</I>'s "Stereo/Hi-Fi Directory" was JBL's "Metregon," at $1230.)