I have a passion for great speaker designs at affordable prices, and with modern driver, crossover, and cabinet technologies making innovative strides, many serious high-end speaker designers are turning their attentions to coming up with the next great budget speaker. All audiophiles need affordable speakers, whether to recommend to friends to lure them into our hobby or to set up multiple, less costly systems in our own houses. I currently run a main reference system, a vacation-house system, a recording-studio system, a computer system, a portable system I take to parties, a car system, <I>and</I> an office system. I insist on having music playing constantly, wherever I am, unless my wife or son tells me to turn it off&mdash;which happens increasingly often these days.

I have a passion for great speaker designs at affordable prices, and with modern driver, crossover, and cabinet technologies making innovative strides, many serious high-end speaker designers are turning their attentions to coming up with the next great budget speaker. All audiophiles need affordable speakers, whether to recommend to friends to lure them into our hobby or to set up multiple, less costly systems in our own houses. I currently run a main reference system, a vacation-house system, a recording-studio system, a computer system, a portable system I take to parties, a car system, <I>and</I> an office system. I insist on having music playing constantly, wherever I am, unless my wife or son tells me to turn it off&mdash;which happens increasingly often these days.

I have a passion for great speaker designs at affordable prices, and with modern driver, crossover, and cabinet technologies making innovative strides, many serious high-end speaker designers are turning their attentions to coming up with the next great budget speaker. All audiophiles need affordable speakers, whether to recommend to friends to lure them into our hobby or to set up multiple, less costly systems in our own houses. I currently run a main reference system, a vacation-house system, a recording-studio system, a computer system, a portable system I take to parties, a car system, <I>and</I> an office system. I insist on having music playing constantly, wherever I am, unless my wife or son tells me to turn it off&mdash;which happens increasingly often these days.

I have a passion for great speaker designs at affordable prices, and with modern driver, crossover, and cabinet technologies making innovative strides, many serious high-end speaker designers are turning their attentions to coming up with the next great budget speaker. All audiophiles need affordable speakers, whether to recommend to friends to lure them into our hobby or to set up multiple, less costly systems in our own houses. I currently run a main reference system, a vacation-house system, a recording-studio system, a computer system, a portable system I take to parties, a car system, <I>and</I> an office system. I insist on having music playing constantly, wherever I am, unless my wife or son tells me to turn it off&mdash;which happens increasingly often these days.

I have a passion for great speaker designs at affordable prices, and with modern driver, crossover, and cabinet technologies making innovative strides, many serious high-end speaker designers are turning their attentions to coming up with the next great budget speaker. All audiophiles need affordable speakers, whether to recommend to friends to lure them into our hobby or to set up multiple, less costly systems in our own houses. I currently run a main reference system, a vacation-house system, a recording-studio system, a computer system, a portable system I take to parties, a car system, <I>and</I> an office system. I insist on having music playing constantly, wherever I am, unless my wife or son tells me to turn it off&mdash;which happens increasingly often these days.

Citing the desire to take advantage of the power of sharing audio files over the Internet, one of the larger independent record labels, <A HREF="http://www.tvtrecords.com/">TVT Records</A>, announced last week that it has withdrawn its copyright claims against the file-sharing company <A HREF="http://www.napster.com/">Napster</A&gt;. TVT said that the basis for its decision to end the lawsuit and provide its support to Napster is "the new service Napster is evolving under the strategic alliance it recently announced with Bertelsmann AG." TVT points out that, since Bertelsmann is still technically a party to litigation with Napster, it becomes the first record label to fully settle with the beleagured Web company.

In a move that some cynics are calling "the beginning of the end" for the <A HREF="http://www.sdmi.org/">Secure Digital Music Initiative</A>, the group's director has abruptly resigned. Leonard Chiariglione, who has headed the cross-industry anti-piracy organization since its inception more than two years ago, made the announcement Wednesday, January 24 at the first SDMI meeting of 2001.

Price-fixing by major record labels isn't confined to the United States. The music industry's "Big Five" (Universal Music, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, EMI Group PLC, and the Bertelsmann Music Group) are now under the scrutiny of European Union antitrust investigators, who are looking into the possibility that the companies may have colluded to keep CD prices artificially high in Europe. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and music industry agreed to <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10744/">settle</A&gt; the American version of the issue in May 2000.

Drummer Billy Higgins started his remarkable career backing up R&B musicians such as Amos Milburn and Bo Diddley around the LA area before embarking on his jazz path with the Jazz Messengers (led by Don Cherry and saxophonist James Clay) and Dexter Gordon. But it was his association with Ornette Coleman, starting in the mid 1950s, that electrified the jazz world and made him a force to reckon with. His first recordings, with Coleman and Red Mitchell, were released in 1958. In 1959, he performed with both Coleman in New York and Thelonious Monk in San Francisco, and from that point on, he never stopped recording or touring.