It seems that all of the forces in the music industry have lately been conspiring against the music lover and audiophile. The record labels and their hired gun, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), have so far blocked digital outputs on high-resolution audio players, insisted that watermarks be inserted into both high- and low-resolution audio data, and have even started to <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/11178/">restrict</A&gt; consumer's fair use of compact discs and digital downloads.

As Larry Greenhill reports in his review of the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/469/">Sony SCD-C555ES SACD changer</A>, "I didn't know what to expect from multichannel SACD. Would a multichannel music-only disc give me high-energy dramatics? Would there be any room for meditative, closed-eyed, total progressive muscular relaxation?" As Greenhill says, "The best was yet to come."

The received wisdom has it that among the billions of humans on earth, no two have identical fingerprints, no matter how closely related they are.

<A HREF="http://www.xmradio.com">XM Satellite Radio Holdings</A> is now in a position to operate well into the fourth quarter of 2002, thanks to a $129 million stock offering underwritten by Morgan Stanley Company. XM made the announcement in a press release dated December 10.

It was an unusually fine day for a New York September. The W train crept from the subway tunnel into the sunlight of the Manhattan Bridge&mdash;"My God, the World Trade Center's on fire!" came the voice of the woman driving the train. I vividly remember what I did the rest of that day&mdash;the day the world terribly changed.

It was an unusually fine day for a New York September. The W train crept from the subway tunnel into the sunlight of the Manhattan Bridge—"My God, the World Trade Center's on fire!" came the voice of the woman driving the train. I vividly remember what I did the rest of that day—the day the world terribly changed.

"Hey, J-10!" John Atkinson called from the hallway outside my office. "I liked your October 'Fine Tunes'!"

As I sit down to write a year's-end musical retrospective, I feel that the old column-writing joke between Stereophile editor John Atkinson and myself about first needing a subject and, second, needing it to make sense, will not be a problem this time out. For me, the music and almost everything else about 2001 have been dwarfed in importance by the mayhem wreaked on New York on September 11.

For any audio company to be successful, it needs to cover what my business school teachers used to call the "Four Ps": Product, Price, Promotion, and Place. In other words, success will follow if a company can slice up its resources to properly promote the right product at the right price and make it available in the right places.