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Love it or hate it, MP3 users are a huge new market, as yet untapped by the music industry. Portable digital compressed-audio players, whether employing Flash memory or compact hard drives à la Apple's iPod, are estimated to begin reaching critical-mass sales numbers around 2006, with an installed base of 24 million units by 2007. Most observers agree that this dramatic growth has been driven, in large part, by the vast quantity of no-fee music that is available in the format, as well as the players' ease of use and flexibility.

Taking the measure of the Chord">http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/624/">Chord Electronics DAC64 D/A processor, John Atkinson finds nice things can come in strange packages. "Such is the pace of development in digital technology these days that it is hard not to become convinced that digital playback is a solved problem." But, as JA discovers, not all solutions are identical.

The National">http://www.nab.org">National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has initiated its planned appeal of a ruling by the Librarian of Congress that establishes a royalty rate for all Webcasters, including traditional radio stations that stream their programming on the Internet.

Historically, radio stations have only partially cooperated with record label attempts to control when and where an important new record is first aired. It's not unusual for a new album or single to be "embargoed" until a specific date by the labels, with stations often competing with each other to find ways to get around this restriction and be first to air a hot new song.

John Atkinson has found himself swept away by the expensive speakers from Wilson Audio Specialties, so he set forth to put the company's new, modestly-priced Sophia">http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/619/">Sophia loudspeaker to the test. JA writes, "The Sophia is all new, from its handcrafted enclosure to its custom-built drive-units."

Love it or loathe it, Internet music is here to stay.

I never "got" the spurs with which Jimmie Lee Robinson provided a percussive accompaniment to his singing and guitar playing, but I became a fan of Jimmie Lee's when I saw him perform on two successive nights at Acoustic">http://www.acousticsounds.com">Acoustic Sounds' first blues festival in Salina, Kansas in September 1998. His subsequent live appearances at Consumer Electronics Shows and at HI-FI '99, Home Entertainment 2001, and HE2002 on behalf of Acoustic Sounds' associated APO">http://www.analogueproductions.com">APO label, were highlights of those events. (I took the accompanying photo at Jimmie Lee's May 31 HE2002http://www.homeentertainment-expo.com">HE2002; gig in New York with harmonica player Wild Child Butler.)