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Show attendees at Home Entertainment 2007, the High Performance Sound & Imaging Show of the year, will be treated to several educational seminars and clinics that will help guide and inform them about the choices confronting contemporary music and film lovers looking for better home entertainment experiences.

During this week's Home">http://www.homeentertainment-expo.com/">Home Entertainment Expo, high-tech entertainment fans will get to enjoy some of the best audio and video gear to be found on the planet. A few lucky ones will get to take some of it home—free.

Québec Audio & Video, Canada's premier home entertainment magazine, is hosting its fourth annual contest held in conjunction with the Home">http://www.he2004.com">Home Entertainment 2004 Show, scheduled to take place May 20–23, 2004 in New York City.

Money and legal pressure can make even the fiercest tiger change its stripes. Nearing the end of prolonged litigation with the music industry, Napsterhttp://www.napster.com/">Napster; has begun to go commercial.

The idea was as cute as the chapeaux that Antonio Long, Randy Johnson, and Marlen Kirby (from left to right in photo above) invariably sport at AudioVision SF. Schedule a public demo on November 14 with two French manufacturers, Triangle Loudspeakers and Devialet, and call it "French Fries." Then, however, reality intervened, and an evening that included debuts of two products, Triangle's Signature line Alpha loudspeakers and Nordost's Sort Füt Premium Kit, morphed into a Franco-American feast complete with Norwegian-American trimmings.

Simaudio has introduced a streaming network streamer/integrated amplifier, the Moon 371, the first product in a new, more affordable series called Compass. Why Compass? The name evokes the name of the higher-end North series, introduced in 2023. "Compass guides you North," a Simaudio rep said at a press event in Boucherville, across the river from Montreal.

The gold rush is on in the wake of a Federal">http://www.ftc.gov/">Federal Trade Commission decision effectively ending the music industry's policy of minimum advertised pricing (MAP) on compact discs. Attorneys in California and New York wasted no time in filing class-action lawsuits against the music industry's major conglomerates, following the FTC's">http://www.stereophile.com/news/10744/">FTC's announcement May 10 that it had reached a negotiated settlement with them over a longstanding noncompetitive pricing policy.

Universal">http://www.umusic.com">Universal Music Group and Warner">http://www.wmg.com">Warner Music Group are more than friendly competitors, in the view of the Federal">http://www.ftc.gov">Federal Trade Commission. They are also partners in crime, according to charges filed against the two on July 31 in New York.

Retail prices of compact discs are likely to drop in the coming months, thanks to a Federal">http://www.ftc.gov/">Federal Trade Commission action ending an industry-wide price-support policy begun five years ago. On May 10, the FTC announced that it had reached an agreement with the "Big Five" of the music business—Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Music, Seagram Ltd.'s Universal Music, Sony Music Entertainment, BMG Entertainment, and EMI Group PLC—that will effectively end the practice of "minimum advertised pricing" (MAP) instituted as a response to music-retailing price wars in the mid-1990s. Under MAP, retailers were forbidden to advertise CDs below an established minimum, at the risk of losing millions of promotional dollars from the record labels.

In the early morning hours of December 11, Joseph Cohen of the Lotus">http://www.lotusgroupusa.com">Lotus Group, the exclusive distributor of Oyaide products in North America, sent out a "Lotus Group News Flash!" The e-mail, dated December 10, declared: