John Atkinson

With Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio four years old as established media this fall, the two-decades-old Compact Disc medium is still well-established as the primary carrier for recorded music. (Yes, it is experiencing a significant threat from downloadable music files, but that is outside my bailiwick as a hardware reviewer.) <I>Stereophile</I> has therefore been paying attention to the high-performance one-box CD players that are available. In May, I wrote about my positive experiences with the $2950 <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/840/">Ayre CX-7</A> and Brian Damkroger favorably reviewed the $2999 <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/839/">GamuT CD1</A>, after having followed up his April 2001 review of the $5495 <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/343/">Simaudio Moon Eclipse</A> player in <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/343/index6.html">April 2003</A>.

In the town where I grew up there were two places to buy records: a family-owned department store and the local Woolworth's, both long gone. The first record I ever bought, the 45rpm single of Roger Miller's "King of the Road," came from the former in 1965. I was 11 years old.

It doesn't take much to read between the lines of Sony's discontinuation of the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//amplificationreviews/700/">TA-P9000ES analog preamplifier</A> and their introduction of the SCD-XA9000ES SACD player with IEEE1394 digital output at <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/news/11662/">Home Entertainment 2003</A>. (A similar feature from the DVD-Audio camp has been promised.) Surely, we will at long last be able to have external digital processing and DACs in our preamp or control units. In addition to the freedom to mix and match components, this opens the door to having a single digital component manage bass and channel balance for all sources, and room/speaker correction without redundant redigitization.

Johnny Cash, the 71-year-old American icon, died September 12 of respiratory failure caused by complications from diabetes. The singer/songwriter had been released from the hospital the preceding day after a two-week struggle with an unspecified stomach ailment.

We kick off three speaker reviews from the September issue with Brian Damkroger's assessment of the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/919/">Audio Physic Virgo III loudspeaker</A>. A perfect meld of minimonitor <I>and</I> full-range bass extension? BD reveals all.

It's just about impossible to imagine a worse public relations campaign than the one being waged by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in the nation's courtrooms.

More compact discs that attempt to restrict how you use them are coming to a record store near you. BMG announced last week that its Arista Records division will be the company's first label in the US to release a commercial CD using copy-restriction technology.