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Last week, IBMhttp://www.ibm.com/harddrive">IBM; announced a new device that it says will allow mobile users to add an extra 10 gigabytes (GB) of hard-drive capacity to their notebook PCs. Why is this important to audio fans? IBM is intending the new drive, called the Travelstar E, to primarily appeal to those wanting to take extended music libraries with them on the road.

Saturday, July 23, 10am–12pm: Constellation Home Electronics (215 North Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe) will host a digital-audio seminar and listening event designed to equip music enthusiasts with the tools needed to understand, embrace, and optimize digital-audio playback systems.

The Southern California headquarters of cable manufacturer AudioQuest, which includes their offices, a listening room, conference rooms, a very very large warehouse, assembly rooms, a graphic design room, a few kitchens and various and sundry other more mundane but just as important places, is within a few-minutes’ drive from T.H.E. Show at Newport Beach. Shane Buettner, AudioQuest's Director of Education who you will most likely recognize as the former Editor-In-Chief of Home Theater magazine, Joe Harley VP of AudioQuest (Joe Harley is also a recording engineer/producer responsible for among others the Blue Note 45rpm reissues from Music Matters and he's a musician), and Andrew Kissinger, Regional Sales Manager, gave a group of A/V journalists, including Tom Norton, Senior Editor and Video Technical Editor of Home Theater magazine, the full tour.

My comments on the tour/AudioQuest facility can be summed up by saying that this is one of the most organized, clean, neat and tidy places I've ever seen. And it's not the kind of organized, clean, neat and tidy you can fake for a tour. From the huge warehouse to the tiniest Ziplock baggy, everything had its place and label. Impressive.

On December 13, 2006, the US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the August 8, 2005 grant of summary judgment in favor of AudioQuest, finding that the district court had correctly terminated Monster Cable's January 5, 2004 assertion that AudioQuest's Dielectric-Bias System (DBS) willfully infringed upon Monster's Bias Circuit System (BCS) patent (US Patent No.5,307,416 for Audio Interconnect & Speaker Cable, "Bias Circuit System").

Friday, October 21, Irvine, CA-based high-end audio manufacturer AudioQuest issued a warning about what appears to be low-priced, inferior-sounding counterfeits of its discontinued AudioQuest DragonFly v1.2. The matter was brought to AudioQuest's attention by a consumer who saw a thread on Reddit about a product that resembled the discontinued DragonFly 1.2's proprietary technical features. The real DragonFly is pictured above right with the subject of the Reddit thread on the left.

The Reference Listening Experience, a two-day event focusing on the latest and greatest hi-fi from around the world, will take place at AudioVision San Francisco next weekend on May 16-17, 2026.

What a difference a change of location can make! What was originally a major challenge—AudioVision SF, one of the country's major dealerships, literally had the rug pulled out from under them by their landlord last spring, and needed to raise money and scurry to a new location—has turned into a major opportunity: a spanking new venue, whose main listening room sounds much—that's much, as in much—better than before.