LATEST ADDITIONS

I've been checking out the Creative Commons&ndash;licensed MP3s at <I>Musikethos</I>. If you dig classical music, you'll find a lot to admire there.

As anyone who has talked me me even briefly over the last month knows, I loved reading <I>King Dork</I>. It's a young adult novel that's one-half rant against <I>Catcher In the Rye</I>, one-half spoof of <I>The Da Vinci Code</I>, and one-half Encyclopedia Brown in the 21<SUP>st</SUP> Century. Yeah, I know that adds up to more than one, but that's how good it is. It's also very knowing about rock trivia and absolutely spot-on about what it feels like to be an "uncool" teen.

"Don't stay too late," JA says, on his way out of the office.

My fellow blogger <A HREF="http://blog.hometheatermag.com/markfleischmann/">Mark Fleischmann</A> has taken his <I>Happy Pig's Hot 100 New York Restaurants</I> online. The listings are available by neighborhood, alphabetically, or by type of cuisine.

"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 <A HREF="http://www.sonos.com">Sonos</A&gt; 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."

Back when everyone was rushing to convert LPs to CDs, the boxed set was a wondrous thing. The rush to "box" every artist propelled the record biz to some of their best Christmas seasons ever. It even inspired some labels to get off their then wealthy asses and dig around the vaults to find that most marvelous of record label offerings, the "bonus track."

You've heard it said that the early bird catches the worm, which is all well and good if you like worms. If you're more interested in music, you might want to follow the lead of Roy Gandy instead: He's the managing director of Rega Research, a 33¹/₃-year-old audio company that was the very last of its kind to enter the CD market. Rega's first CD player, the Planet of 1996, was a success in virtually every way.