Danish audio-video manufacturer <A HREF="http://www.bang-olufsen.com/">Bang & Olufsen</A> has long been known for its unusual product designs. Eschewing the normal tendency of consumer electronics manufacturers to design their circuits and transports into stackable black boxes, the company's current home-audio line includes colorful vertical CD stacks with sliding clear-glass doors and brushed-aluminum cylindrical speakers.

The world's third largest music company has thrown its massive weight behind Internet audio. On June 10, EMI Recorded Music, a division of <A HREF="http://www.emigroup.com/">EMI Group Plc</A>, announced a five-year licensing agreement with Reston, Virginia-based <A HREF="http://www.musicmaker.com/">Musicmaker.com</A&gt;, a major custom CD compilation service and digital download site. EMI has not simply made its enormous catalog available to the service---it has also bought into Musicmaker.com with a 50% equity stake.

Last Thursday, <A HREF="http://www.virgin.com/">Virgin Entertainment Group</A> announced an agreement with <A HREF="http://www.reddotnet.com/">RedDotNet</A&gt;, a Digital on Demand company, that Virgin says will allow its customers to download music and create custom CDs, DVDs, and MiniDiscs in-store. Virgin describes the deal as "a revolutionary development heralding a new wave of music retailing." As part of the agreement, Virgin will become a shareholder in Digital on Demand, RedDotNet's parent company.

Writer Robert Deutsch takes an in-depth look at the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/118/">Hales Design Group Revelation Three loudspeaker</A> in an attempt to determine whether the product lives up to its name. He also checks into the manufacturer's claim that "what we made will forever change the world of dynamic loudspeakers . . . an instant classic, a benchmark against which others of its type are measured."

Steve Portocarrero passed away Monday, June 7 from Lou Gehrig's Disease, or ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), which he was diagnosed with two years ago.

John Wright was one of the most important figures on the British hi-fi scene since the mid-1960s. His natural modesty and reticence made it easy to underestimate a working life that encompassed an unusually wide range of different roles: from inventor to speaker engineer to reviewer to businessman.

Last week, <A HREF="http://www.tdk.com%20">TDK</A&gt; announced that it is introducing extended-capacity, 80-minute/700MB multimedia and music CD-R discs this July. The new discs add 50MB, or 6 minutes of stereo music capacity, to the conventional 74-minute/650MB CD-R disc. TDK says it is the first manufacturer to offer extended-capacity CD-Rs, and points out that it has been supplying recording studios with 80-minute CD-Rs for music-mastering applications since 1996.(<I>Stereophile</I>'s new 77+ minute <I>Bravo!</I> CD, featuring chamber music by Elgar and Mozart, for example, was mastered on a 700MB TDK CD-R.)

Conrad-Johnson has been on a roll with their Anniversary Reference Triode preamplifier, aka the ART, which garnered the <I>Stereophile</I> Product of the Year award in 1998. (See <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/10318/">previous article</A>.) According to Lew Johnson, "We realized that Conrad-Johnson is coming up on its 20th anniversary, so we thought we might produce something special to celebrate. This is a version of the preamplifier we use in our listening room at the factory---we never even thought about producing it because it would be god-awful expensive. But it really is our last thought on what a preamp should be, so we figured we'd produce a limited edition, say 250 total, as a way of commemorating our 20 years in the business."