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When a retailer entitles his two-day open house, "Innovations in High Fidelity," it's essential that his staff know their stuff. For Audio Consultants, there was no question. With four stores in the greater Chicago area, Audio Consultants is, save perhaps for Magnolia, the largest as well as longest established audio dealer in the region.

Audio Consultants was also the only Chicago area high-end store to abstain from exhibiting at Axpona Chicago. When asked why, Simon Zreczny, who runs the store with his son, Alan, replied, "I don't like to be at shows. I don't enjoy doing them. I'm happiest with my customers. I attend 50 live concerts a year, and I always see my customers next to me."

"I don't get why some audiophiles still think that saving data using a lossless compression scheme like FLAC or Apple Lossless sounds any different than an uncompressed CD file," says Sonoshttp://www.sonos.com">Sonos; founder and VP of Sales and Marketing Thomas S. Cullen between bites of white fish shish kebab. "It's just mathematics, and the results are sonically identical, but you save half the space on your hard drive."

Ever since 2013, when Alon Wolf's California-based Magico loudspeaker company consolidated its original 5000 sq. ft. Berkeley headquarters and 5000 sq. ft. San Jose warehouse into a single 20,000 ft. facility in Hayward, people have been telling me that I had to experience the company's "incredible" listening room. Ironically, it was only after I had relocated from the Bay Area to Port Townsend, WA, that the opportunity arose to take Alon Wolf up on his long-standing invitation to visit.

It is with regret that we announce to Stereophile's readers the closing of Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab, on November 19, 1999. Known to audiophiles since its inception in 1977, the company provided serious listeners with hundreds of remastered LPs, cassettes, and CDs.

Thursday March 19th, 5–8pm: Shelley's Stereo, 22102 Clarendon St. in Woodland Hills, CA, will host representatives from Yamaha for a Yamaha 5000-series listening party.

Chip manufacturer ESS">http://www.esstech.com">ESS Technology is no stranger to audiophiles interested in new formats. It was responsible for one of the first "universal" SACD/DVD-Audio decoding">http://www.stereophile.com/news/11059/">decoding chips and more recently was the supplier of a special-purpose">http://www.stereophile.com/news/11296/">special-purpose chip for Linn's SACD "Silver Disk Engine" designs.

Okay, now things are getting confusing. Hot on the heels of his announcementhttp://www.stereophile.com/news/010107hacked/">announcement; that he had hacked HD DVD's Advanced Access Content System (AACS) digital rights management (DRM), muslix64 claimed to have done the same to Blu-Ray's implementation, with the help of anti-DRM crusader Janvitos. You can read the whole saga at the Doom9">http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=120869">Doom9 forum but we'll just give you the juicy bits: "In less than 24 hours, without any Blu-ray equipment, but with the help of Janvitos, I managed to decrypt and play a Blu-ray media file using my known-plaintext attack."