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Just about a month away, HI-FI">http://www.hifishow.com">HI-FI '98, The Home Theater & Specialty Audio Show, will interest thousands of audio enthusiasts when it visits The Westin Los Angeles Airport Hotel in Los Angeles, California from Wednesday, June 10 to Sunday, June 14, 1998.

Remember when you weren't too busy to make your own cassette tapes to play in the car? How you could link one song to the next by genre or theme or beat or musical key? Remember how much more satisfying it was to listen to those tapes than it was to listen to the radio? No commercials, no announcers, no filler---and you liked every tune.

The next generation of streaming media technology was unveiled last week at RealNetworks' Conference '98 in Burlingame, California. The star of the show? "Bandwidth-friendly" RealPlayer G2, which promises to make noisy audio and glitchy video a part of the Web's past.

Is it merely the tip of the iceberg, or a temporary diversion? Hard to say just yet, but a recent report from the Consumer">http://www.cema.org">Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association (CEMA) suggests that increasing numbers of folks are using their PCs in place of, or in addition to, regular audio systems.

Specialty audio manufacturers did better than expected in 1997, with factory sales as high as $1.4 billion, as reported last">http://www.stereophile.com/news/10148/">last week. More figures from the Consumer">http://www.cema.org">Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association indicate that the High End's good fortune is part of a bigger trend.

On April 15, ASCAPhttp://www.ascap.com/">ASCAP; (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), the music performing-rights organization, and Liquid">http://www.liquidaudio.com">Liquid Audio, a developer of secure online music delivery systems, announced a strategic alliance to protect ownership of music on the Internet. According to a Liquid Audio press release, the initiative encourages, streamlines, and simplifies music-rights licensing and reporting, and will benefit website creators as well as music writers, publishers, and composers.

Everyone claims "CD-quality" sound over the Internet these days, but the reality always seems far short of that promise. As a result, work continues to develop an encoding scheme worthy of the CD-quality title. Recently we reportedhttp://www.stereophile.com/news/10133/">reported; on developments at AT&Thttp://www.att.com">AT&T; regarding the a2bhttp://www.a2bmusic.com">a2b; format, and both Liquid">http://www.liquidaudio.com">Liquid Audio and RealNetworkshttp://www.realnetworks.com">RealNetworks; compete on a weekly basis to grab headlines for their audio technology announcements.