<B>JIMMY SMITH: <I>Dot Com Blues</I></B><BR>Jimmy Smith, Hammond B-3 organ; Russell Malone, Phil Upchurch, guitar; Reggie McBride, electric bass; Harvey Mason, drums; Lennie Castro, percussion. Guest: Dr. John, vocal, piano;, Etta James, vocal; B.B. King, Taj Mahal, vocals, guitars; Keb' Mo,' vocals. Horn section: Darrell Leonard, trumpet, arr.; Oscar Brashear, Leslie Drayton, trumpets; Herman Riley, Joe Sublett, saxes; George Bohanon, Maurice Spears, trombones<BR>Verve 314 549 978-2 (CD). 2000. John Porter, prod.; Rik Pekkonen, eng. DDD. TT: 60:43<BR>Performance <B>****</B><BR>Sonics <B>*****</B>

It's a season of mixed results in the electronics industry. On April 9, Peabody, MA&ndash;based <A HREF="http://www.bostonacoustics.com">Boston Acoustics</A> announced that it has slashed jobs due to a slow fourth quarter, reducing its workforce from 389 to 327 as a result of slowing sales. The loudspeaker manufacturer expects earnings of more than $4.2 million for the year ending March 31, a figure that puts the company in a profitable position despite a loss of close to $1 million for the final quarter.

Consumers attending the Home Entertainment 2001 Show in NYC, May 11&ndash;13, 2001, will have a unique opportunity to speak with and learn from the home entertainment industry's leading experts. As part of the three-day audio and video extravaganza, the Show will offer educational seminars and panel discussions&mdash;included with the admission ticket price on a first come, first served basis. This is a rare opportunity for consumers to meet with legendary industry journalists, manufacturers, dealers, and others.

To balance or not to balance? That is the audio question that Martin Colloms sets out to answer in <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//features/335/">Balance: Benefit or Bluff?</A> Although balanced capability is a fashionable feature in many expensive audio products, Colloms writes that "the High End could be paying dangerous, costly lip service to the received wisdom that balanced operation is the goal for an audio system."

In the perfect digital future, audiophiles would be able to drink from the purest of high-resolution audio datastreams with no worry that someone upstream had polluted the current. But in the real world, content providers and hardware manufacturers increasingly conspire to dirty the flow a little and limit unauthorized consumption by controlling the technology needed to filter out their toxic additives.

During the past year, hardly a day has gone by without headlines announcing the latest twist in the fate of embattled free music service <A HREF="http://www.napster.com">Napster.com</A&gt;. Lost in the hysteria was Napster's tiny rival <A HREF="http://www.emusic.com/">Emusic.com</A&gt;, a three-year-old online music venture that always charged its subscribers for downloading tunes, and always paid the copyright holders. For news appeal, Emusic's paltry 10,000 subscribers and languishing stock price didn't compare to Napster's reported 75 million users and major league court battles.

Give an engineering team a blank page and a blank check and there's no telling what they'll come up with. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, for example, one company showed a <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/430/">$25,000 CD transport</A> with laser-pickup mechanism that was separate from its disc drive&mdash;almost the cosmic equivalent of having the sun revolve around the earth.

Give an engineering team a blank page and a blank check and there's no telling what they'll come up with. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, for example, one company showed a <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/430/">$25,000 CD transport</A> with laser-pickup mechanism that was separate from its disc drive&mdash;almost the cosmic equivalent of having the sun revolve around the earth.

Give an engineering team a blank page and a blank check and there's no telling what they'll come up with. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, for example, one company showed a <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/430/">$25,000 CD transport</A> with laser-pickup mechanism that was separate from its disc drive&mdash;almost the cosmic equivalent of having the sun revolve around the earth.