Barry Willis

Rolling Stone is going head-to-head with MTV. Last week, Wenner Media, Inc, announced a partnership with JamTV to create a music site on the Web. Wenner is the parent company of Rolling Stone magazine. JamTV is an eight-month-old Internet start-up that broadcasts live concerts.

Rare violin dealer Geoffrey Fushi has devoted many of the past several years and a substantial portion of his liquid assets to producing The Miracle Makers, a reference book-and-recording project honoring the works of Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesu, late 17th- and early 18th-century makers of the world's most sought-after violins. Fushi is also the founder of the Stradivari Society, a philanthropical organization of violin fanciers who loan their invaluable instruments to gifted students. Members believe that their treasures were intended to make music, not merely to gather dust in heavily guarded vaults.

Note: While not directly related to high-end audio, we thought that Stereophile's web readers may find this story of interest.

The audio community's "Great Debate" has reached an amazing level of absurdity. On one side are the Objectivists, whose rationalist argument insists that all human auditory experience is the result of electro-physical phenomena which can be measured and mapped using established scientific methods. On the other side are the Subjectivists, romantics who believe in the synergistic interplay of music, room, equipment, and listener, and whose attempts to describe their experiences tend toward the florid and metaphorical.