After months of wrangling, the <A HREF="http://www.sdmi.org/">Secure Digital Music Initiative</A> (SDMI) has announced its first set of standards for portable digital music devices. Manufacturers can now incorporate these standards into the designs of new products. Many industry observers believe that portables will be the next big wave in consumer audio, expected to hit the market by the winter holiday season.

Winter had just touched down in Santa Fe two days before the recording sessions were to begin, leading Wes Phillips to wonder if the damp air would wreak havoc with tuning. But he needn't have worried, writing that violinist Ida Levin "played with such intense concentration that sometimes she seemed about to levitate off the floor as she chased a melodic line into the ether." In <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//features/125/"><I>Duet</I>: And Two to Carry Your Soul Away</A>, Ida Levin and John Atkinson join Wes Phillips in chronicling the recording from both musical and technical perspectives.

John Atkinson's and my collective response was "Good grief!" on hearing that the UK's <A HREF="http://www.haymarketgroup.co.uk/">Haymarket Magazines</A> had purchased <A HREF="http://www.gramophone.co.uk/">Gramophone Publications</A>. Minds boggled at the very idea of the venerable old lady of classical-music criticism getting into bed with the much younger, altogether brasher, and unashamedly populist <I>What Hi-Fi?</I>, market leader among UK hi-fi mags. As Haymarket enigmatically put it, "With its emphasis on in-depth reviewing, <I>Gramophone</I> itself has great synergy with other titles in the Haymarket portfolio, such as <A HREF="http://www.whathifi.com/"><I>What Hi-Fi?</I></A> magazine."

Wes Phillips writes, "I catch John's eye and wonder if he's pondering the same question I am: <I>What were we thinking?</I>" In addition to trying to push forward the limits of getting great sound onto tape, <I>Stereophile</I>'s release of <I>Rhapsody In Blue</I> would offer the public a groundbreaking arrangement of George Gershwin's most popular orchestral work. In "<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//features/124/">The <I>Rhapsody</I> Project</A>," Hyperion Knight and John Atkinson join Wes in chronicling their perspectives on the processes leading to this landmark recording.

According to a recent report released by Information Technology researchers <A HREF="http://www.frost.com">Frost & Sullivan</A>, the world Internet audio market generated revenues totaling $42 million in 1998, which dwarfs the 1997 revenues by 1516%. The report predicts that this market will continue growing at a healthy rate, achieving an increase into the triple percentage digits by the end of 1999.

Since the earliest days of stereo&mdash;the first experiments with more than single-channel sound happened back in the 1930s&mdash;recording and playback have been based on a horizontal model: left-center-right, left-rear, right-rear. "Laterality," as it's sometimes called, can be exploited very well in creating plausible sensations of spatial events, especially by film-industry sound engineers. The believable reproduction of music is considerably more problematic.

The <A HREF="http://www.jeffrowland.com/">Jeff Rowland Design Group</A> is alive and well and in no danger of going out of business. The company was the victim of hackers who recently broke into the company's website and posted a notice to the contrary.

Last week, the Secure Digital Music Initiative announced that it would allow free MP3 downloads to co-exist with new encrypted forms of digital music transmission. Despite this, widespread concern in corporate legal departments about copyright-violation liability has prompted software developers to come up with blocking techniques to prevent pirated music from entering company "Intranets."

One would think that the Internet was growing crowded with online music retailers such as CDnow/N2K, Amazon.com, EveryCD, and Tower Records, just to name a few, all hustling CDs. But the lure of gold in them e-commerce hills is hard to resist. Last week, <A HREF="http://barnesandnoble.com">barnesandnoble.com</A&gt; jumped into the fray and announced the launch of its own Music Store, featuring what the company describes as the first "online classical music superstore." Notably late to market with its online bookselling franchise, barnesandnoble.com hopes to gain ground against arch-rival Amazon.com by expanding beyond books and better focusing on niche markets.