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No CDs for you, Tower: The Los Angeles Times reportedhttp://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tower4aug04,0,736949.story?coll=l…; August 4 that Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and EMI have cut off CD shipments to Tower Records because the record chain has stopped paying its bills. Sony BMG may have also stopped shipping to Tower, but the Times was not able to confirm those reports.

One of the great sopranos of the 20th century, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, died in her sleep at her home in Schruns, Austria, on August 3, at the age of 90. The myriad ways in which she employed her remarkably expressive, silvery soprano gave rise to as much admiration and respect as her penchant for incessant nuance, along with her Nazi past, generated controversy.

Just as the mythical Phoenix arose from its own ashes, the birds of the Talon Audio line have again taken flight, this time as Talon Loudspeakers. As of August 7, Rives Audio (www.rivesaudio.com) has acquired Talon Audio and plans to reintroduce many of the company's most successful models.

Slim Devices, the company best known for the Squeezeboxhttp://www.stereophile.com/images/newsletter/306Bstph.html">Squeezebox<…;, has announced what it is billing as "the most advanced networked audio system available." At Stereophile, we hear this claim all the time, and it usually means that a computer peripheral company has added another USB port to a product aimed at the MP3 crowd.

In May, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) suedhttp://stereophile.com/news/052206xmtrials/">sued; XM Satellite Radio over the Pioneer">http://www.xm-radio-satellite.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=… Inno portable player, which has a 1GB recording capacity, but no way of porting the recordings outside the player.

As it has for the last 10 years, The">http://www.fatwyre.com/">The Cable Company, along with many of its vendors, is dedicating August to help some of "the poorest people in the most ravaged regions of the world."

Some days I feel like Stereophile's designated audio antichrist. After all, I wrote an automotive audio column for the magazine about 10 years back—a feature that prompted more than one reader to send the pages carrying my column back to Santa Fe as "not what I subscribed for"—and I reviewed the http://stereophile.com/mediaservers/934/ ">iPod. So, not really being a glutton for punishment, I wasn't wildly enthusiastic when Edelman account executive Stefani Gudis tendered an invitation to hear the Infiniti/Bose "Studio On Wheels" model G35 sedan. It wasn't that I didn't think that car audio could be a valid musical experience, I simply had been disappointed too many times by car manufacturers touting "audiophile" sound packages, which, upon examination, were probably more about preventing aftermarket add-ons by car audio installers. BTDT, as the kids text-message.