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Sometimes, taking what looks like the easy route turns out to be a bust. The line for cabs outside the Alexis Park Resort Hotel in Las Vegas, home of the high-end audio exhibits at the 2002 Consumer Electronics Show, must have been at least 50 people long. So much for the post-9/11 forecasts of doom that had preceded the convention: last fall's Comdex may have been a bust, but the official <A HREF="http://www.ce.org">CES visitor count</A> of 100,307, if a little lower than the past two years' attendances, still seemed respectable (and surpassed 1999's total of 97,370).

Reader RJM wants to know if you share your audio system with others.

Analog audio electronics are approaching "maturity," a state eventually achieved by most technologies, in which almost all the great discoveries have been made and progress becomes a process of increasingly arcane refinements. Digital audio is in no such danger, as evidenced by three new product announcements made the first week of April.

In a never-ending quest to control what it believes is an epidemic of piracy, the music industry in recent years has gone after Internet file-sharing startups, fly-by-night CD duplicators, foreign pirates operating on an industrial scale, college kids with too much time on their hands, and street-corner vendors hawking badly-duped cassettes. At times the anti-piracy campaign has reached the fervor of a witch hunt, with blame laid on the innocent as well as the guilty.

High-end audio and home-theater enthusiasts attending <A HREF="http://www.homeentertainment-expo.com">Home Entertainment 2002</A>, The Hi-Fi and Home Theater Event in New York City on May 31&ndash;June 2, 2002, will have an opportunity to participate in a series of interactive seminars and panel discussions on the latest advances in technology&mdash;all included with the price of admission.

Back in September of 1986, the <A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/550/">KEF R107 loudspeaker</A> represented the flagship of KEF's much admired Reference Series. Dick Olsher and a variety of other <I>Stereophile</I> scribes profile this important audio achievement over the course of five years, wrapping up with Tom Norton's 1995 review of the R107/2 "Raymond Cooke Signature Edition."

You have to wonder what Sony is thinking. The <A HREF="http://www.sonystyle.com/vaio/digitalstudio/index.shtml">product copy</A> claims that the new Sony "VAIO Digital Studio" computer is the company's "incredible computing and entertainment hybrid combining television, recording, playback and even music." Oooops. Forget about that music part, especially if you purchase Sony Music's latest Celine Dion CD.

<A HREF="http://www.madrigal.com">Madrigal</A>'s Proceed line of high-end audio products will be phased out some time later this year, according to an April 3 press release.

Reader Doug Cline says this question came to him after watching <I>Ripley's Believe it or Not</I>: Have you ever tried an odd or out-there audio tweak that actually worked? What was it?

At the recently concluded SAE-CEA Digital Car Conference in Detroit, representatives of the recording industry joined <A HREF="http://www.panasonic.com">Panasonic</A&gt; for a DVD-Audio love-fest hailing the format as the "in-car music delivery system of the future." Panasonic's automotive electronics division used the conference and exhibition to introduce and demonstrate its first mobile DVD-Audio systems for OEM distribution. The company also hosted seminars exploring how it imagines DVD-Audio will specifically apply to and benefit the automobile industry.