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In "Working">http://www.stereophile.com//asweseeit/190/">Working in the Front Line," Martin Colloms writes: "A committed audio equipment reviewer operates at the front line of audio subjectivity. How is it possible to do this successfully, when a similar task undertaken by an industrial laboratory or test house would take five times as long, cost ten times as much, and deliver a verdict of arguably poorer relevance?" How indeed . . . Colloms explains himself.

San Diego-based MP3.comhttp://www.mp3.com/">MP3.com;, a premier website for distributing the music of unsigned bands, has announced a new program called Beam-it, via which copies of commercial CDs will be stored at the site. The copies will be instantly available to customers who have purchased the music from affiliated online retailers, company officials said. About 40,000 CDs have already been archived on the site.

On January 14, anyone calling Naim Audio heard an Elgar recording, and visitors to the Naim">http://www.naim-audio.com">Naim website forum learned the sad news that founder and managing director Julian Vereker had died. The company—indeed, British hi-fi as a whole—is mourning the loss of one of its brightest and strongest personalities.

Digital perfectionists Meridian obviously pulled out all the stops on their new flagship speaker product, the DSP8000. Checking in at $45,000/pair, the eight-driver Digital Active design is expected to hit the market sometime in March. Meridian claims the three-way powered speaker has a 24/96 digital input on the back and processes the digital signal internally with two 100MHz DSP engines operating with 24/192 resolution. Also on display were the new DSP33s, also Digital Active but more modestly priced at $4500/pair.

The music business is a $13-billion-a-year industry, but the high-end audio industry reaches only a tiny fraction of the music lovers that number represents. "Everybody loves music, so why don't they love specialty audio?" was the question addressed to a group of industry experts at one of a series of AudioCafe.com-sponsored">http://www.audiocafe.com/">AudioCafe.com-sponsored panel discussions on Friday, January 7, at the Alexis Park, during the 2000 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The month of December was particularly hard on the music world, which lost three of its greatest talents within a few days of each other: Curtis Mayfield, Grover Washington, Jr., and Charles Earland. All were in their late 50s.

It's been a tough year for some of the audiophile record labels, as witnessed by the demise in late November of Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab (see previous">http://www.stereophile.com/news/10614/">previous story). The shock of MoFi's sudden departure even prompted Kimber Kable's Ray Kimber to fire off an e-mail to everyone within virtual reading range, urging them to buy a few audiophile CDs and LPs right now, before it's too late.