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I'm currently attending GuangZhou Hi-Fi 2006 in GuangZhou, China (you can read my China">http://blog.stereophile.com/china2006//index.html">China Hi-Fi Tour 2006 blog). The show is a fantastic audio event and everywhere I look, I see products I want—some very similar to mainstream US brands and some exceedingly strange and different. But the audiophiles are familiar: Show me a guy who lights up in the glow of a 300B and I'll show you one of my chosen people.

One of the great tragedies of Tower Records' lingering demise was that classical music lovers lost perhaps their most reliable source of recordings. Say what you will about brick-and-mortar record stores, there was something wonderful about finding what you wanted where it was supposed to be. Just try looking up, say, Bruckner's Fourth Symphony on Amazon and see what you get. (Amazon's AI, as good as it is, is a classical music idiot.)

On November 22, the Librarian of Congress issued a—take a deep breath— declaration">http://www.copyright.gov/1201/">declaration of exemption from the prohibition against circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. In other words, the LOC decreed that six classes of "non-infringing rights" were exempt from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which criminalized "production and dissemination of technology whose primary purpose is to circumvent measures taken to protect copyright."

Despite griping and grumbling about the">http://www.stereophile.com/news/100206ces/">the change, many makers of high-performance audio gear appear to have settled on their new official venue at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas: the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino. Two months before the start of the 2007 CES (to be held January 8–11), all but 12 of the Venetian's 198 exhibit rooms and suites had already been sold.

Dedicated audiophile and all-around nice chap Bill Leebens sent along an email a few days ago, noting:




"Stereophile friends: