<I>"How sour sweet music is<BR>When time is broke and no proportion kept!"</I>

Audio retail revival: Electronics retailers throughout the US are ramping up their commitment to audio separates, according to a June 21 report by Joseph Palenchar in <I>TWICE</I> (This Week in Consumer Electronics). Palenchar describes the new emphasis on audio components as a response to declining margins on "home theater in a box" (HtiB) systems. Through April of this year, factory-to-dealer audio component sales rose 29.8% to $344.6 million, with April sales up 41.9%, hitting a four-year high of $86.9 million.

Will surround sound rejuvenate the music industry? That's the position many record label execs took when adding the capability to DVD-Audio and SACD years ago. But while they wait for the high-rez formats to catch on, <A HREF="http://www.srslabs.com">SRS Labs</A> has decided to add multichannel audio to the conventional compact disc.

Brian Damkroger listens long and hard to the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/digitalsourcereviews/604primare">Primare D30.2 CD player</A> noting, "Primare is reluctant to provide much technical detail about their designs, preferring to let their products do the talking." So after a little chatting, BD files his report.

The US Senate has gotten serious about going after file sharers. On Friday, June 25, senators approved legislation that would allow the Justice Department to impose heavy civil penalties on people found to have shared and/or downloaded copyrighted material over the Internet.

The NHT Xd DSP powered speaker demo was held at the Plaza Hotel in New York City last week and representatives from <A HREF="www.nhthifi.com">NHT</A&gt; and its supporting cast, <A HREF="http://www.deqx.com/">DEQX</A&gt; and <A HREF="http://www.PowerPhysics.com/">PowerPhysics</A&gt;, opened by explaining the philosophy behind the new product and the essential components they each contributed (also see <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/022304nht/index.html">previous</A&gt;).

Tom Jung's career has been dotted with numbers. In 1969, he and a partner founded Sound 80, a Minneapolis recording studio named by an advertising wizard who had previously conjured up the appellation Cure 81 for a Hormel ham, supposedly while sipping Vat 69 scotch. Some years later, engineers from another Midwestern company with a numeral in its name, 3M, stopped by with an experimental tape recorder that also employed digits. Those zeros and ones proved critical to the recordings Jung went on to engineer and produce at his next company, Digital Music Products, better known as DMP.

Tom Jung's career has been dotted with numbers. In 1969, he and a partner founded Sound 80, a Minneapolis recording studio named by an advertising wizard who had previously conjured up the appellation Cure 81 for a Hormel ham, supposedly while sipping Vat 69 scotch. Some years later, engineers from another Midwestern company with a numeral in its name, 3M, stopped by with an experimental tape recorder that also employed digits. Those zeros and ones proved critical to the recordings Jung went on to engineer and produce at his next company, Digital Music Products, better known as DMP.

The Placette Audio Remote Volume Control is simplicity itself: a paperback-sized black box with one set of unbalanced inputs and outputs, a toggle switch (and a remote) to change the level, and a row of LEDs that light up to indicate the relative volume level. The signal path, too, is simple, with only a stepped attenuator between input and output. But this is not just any attenuator&mdash;it's a 125-step model built entirely with super-premium Vishay S-102 foil resistors.