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With $60,000 in award money as incentive, the hacker community is helping the Secure">http://www.sdmi.org/">Secure Digital Music Initiative find out just how secure six proposed watermarking technologies really are. On October 12, as SDMI representatives were testinghttp://www.stereophile.com/news/10870/">testing; the audibility of three of the watermarks, the organization announced the closure of a month-long challenge it had offered hackers: break the code. According to the terms of the challenge, each defeated technology will mean $10,000 to a successful hacker.

Kalman Rubinson gives a long listen to the 1998 Stereophile Editor's Choice winner, the Z-Systems">http://www.stereophile.com//amplificationreviews/278/">Z-Systems rdp-1 digital preamplifier. Like many audiophiles, Kal eschewed tone controls in favor of the purist approach—until he met the rdp-1. As he puts it: "Now, the time has come for DSP to give the audiophile some powerful tools to tailor frequency response and to correct faults in the recording."

Last night I saw him on the stair—
the little man who wasn't there.
I saw him there again today;
oh, how I wish he'd go away.

Mastering engineer Denny Purcell let out a long sigh. "Does anyone in this room really believe that any of this is going to do any good?" he asked. Of the eight or nine people—each with decades of experience in the music and/or audio industries—hanging out at Georgetown Masters Studios in Nashville for SDMI's Phase II listening tests, no one said "Yes." The consensus: The watermarking issue will probably be dead and forgotten within a year.

Following on the heels of its announcement">http://www.stereophile.com/news/10863/">announcement last week of the first commercially available DVD-Audio disc (Swingin' for the Fences, by Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band), Silverline">http://www.silverlinerecords.com">Silverline Records says that Aaron Neville will become the first major artist to release an album in the format. Silverline expects that, on October 24, Neville's solo album Devotion will be released on DVD-A. The disc will also include audio tracks compatible with standard DVD players.

Slap echo got you in a flutter? Jonathan Scull writes, in "Fine">http://www.stereophile.com//finetunes/275/">"Fine Tunes" #27, that "last month I delved into avoiding reflective, parallel-wall slap echoes from ruining your audiophile day. But I've since learned of a perfectly useful workaround that's much less costly and involved than horsing around the Sheetrock." George Cardas lends a hand.

Warner Music Group may have just announced its first DVD-Audio titles (see related">http://www.stereophile.com/news/10861/">related story), but an upstart independent label is claiming the first DVD-A discs actually available for sale. In an attempt to establish itself as the leader in the new DVD-Audio format, 5.1 Entertainment Group's Silverline">http://www.silverlinerecords.com/">Silverline Records says it has begun shipping the first commercially available 24-bit/96kHz DVD-Audio disc, Swingin' for the Fences, by Gordon Goodwin's Big Phat Band.