Jason Victor Serinus

Tipped off by <I>Stereophile</I> reader David Goodwin, I recently visited the San Francisco Airport Museum's beautifully thought-out and executed exhibit <A HREF="http://www.sfoarts.org/exhibits/f2/f2-current.html"><I>The History of Audio: The Engineering of Sound</I></A>. Installed to coincide with the 121st convention of the Audio Engineering Society, held at San Francisco's Moscone Center October 5&ndash;8, the exhibit runs through May 2007 in the North Connect Gallery of the airport's Terminal 3 (footnote 1).

Surprise! If you love Beethoven, Schnittke, Reich, and Richard Strauss, and frequently play classical music on your iPod or hard drive, you're far from alone. Results of an Internet poll of classical music listeners commissioned by the British magazine <I>Gramophone</I> reveal that 75% of those surveyed use 21st-century media&mdash;everything from PCs to MP3 players&mdash;and 57% have ripped some of their classical CD collection to another digital format. In fact, 20% of respondents not only download classical music legally, but prefer to listen to it on their MP3 or other digital music player.

Classical music specialist Channel Classics, headquartered in the Netherlands, has begun releasing the first DSD-native, hybrid multichannel SACDs recorded in China. Issued under the Channel of China imprint, the first two titles, <I>Ambush on All Sides</I> (CCS-SA-80106), featuring Zhang Hong Yan on solo pipa, and <I>Soliloquy at Cold Mountain Temple</I> (CCS-SA-80406), with the China National Symphony Orchestra under Li Xin Cao, have recently reached the US. A third SACD, featuring Yu Hong Mei on erhu (CCS-SA-80206), is scheduled to reach European shelves at the end of September and the US three or four months later.

We all know the refrain. Classical music is losing its audience. With shorter attention spans, the ascent of the iPod, a penchant for music (and spoken word masquerading as music) in the background, and the submergence of audio by home theater, fewer and fewer people in the United States are being exposed to art music of the past and present.

"The trouble with some reviewers..."

Naxos, possibly the world's largest classical music label, has taken a leap into the virtual universe of digital downloading. In an unprecedented collaboration&mdash;including Naxos of America, the country's largest independent distributor of classical music; eMusic, the world's second-largest digital music service; and bricks-and-mortar retailers such as Borders&mdash;Naxos has introduced MPkey, an exclusive series of downloadable classical music collections. Available for purchase only at bricks-and-mortar retailers (and exclusively at Borders stores through December 1), MPkey enables consumers to painlessly download pre-selected Naxos collections of classical music.

On August 29, Nonesuch Records gave its first donation of $1 million to Habitat for Humanity International. The funds, raised in only eight months through sales of 150,000 copies of Nonesuch's superb benefit album <I>Our New Orleans 2005</I>, will be used to build homes for displaced musicians and others in the New Orleans Habitat Musicians' Village, whose centerpiece will be the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.