Wes Phillips

Bill Thompson explains how DRM supersedes copyright law and chills creativity.

Mark Mortimer's review of <I>Einstein and the Old One</I> makes an interesting point&mdash;just because we "know" stuff our ancestors didn't doesn't actually make us smarter. We "know" without comprehending.

We've received your feedback about the Sonos cover on the latest <I>Stereophile</I>. If you were in charge of the magazine and could put anything you wanted on its cover, what would it be?

Perhaps the amplifier that had the most influence on modern tube-amp design was the D.T.N Williamson, shown here in an example made by Goodsell of Brighton.

On display in the ballroom at the <I>Hi-Fi News</I> Show: an original early-'50s Corner Ribbon speaker from the Acoustical Company, later to change its name to Quad.

Exceptionally tall speaker engineer Karl-Heinz Fink, and his more diminutive partner Lampos Ferekedis, stand each side of their remarkable prototype BMR technology demonstrator (balanced-mode radiator; see the December 2005 Stereophile). These two, forming a "gang of four" with original inventor Dr Graham Bank and marketing man John Vizor, have licensed the BMR technology from NXT, and the prototype, using a 3.4" BMR unit upwards from 400Hz, via an active crossover, clearly showed the considerable potential of this radical driver, which in effect automatically reduces the radiating diameter as frequency rises.

According to the glossy leaflet, the Lizard Wizard on show at the Heathrow Renaissance Hotel is, to quote verbatim: "a PMC amplifier that handles High Quality loudspeakers superior, without the everyday type amplifiers air disturbance [acoustic aliasing distortion]." No I'm not sure either, and the rest of the blurb is similarly opaque. Clearly translating Hungarian into English (or even American!) has its pitfalls, and I didn't get much further chatting face-to-face, either. What is certain is that this colourful amplifier looks cute and is incredibly compact&mdash;the actual electronics may be seen sitting on the business card just in front. In this case the PMC bit stands for a "ParaMagnetic Current," or virtual-coil amplifier, which is rated at 60Wpc into 8 ohms, but has a specified output impedance of 0&ndash;36 ohms. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice once remarked.