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Editor's Note: Richard">http://www.richardhess.com">Richard Hess has recently spent time remastering several CDs and wrote about the experience for an engineering newsgroup. We think Stereophile's online readers will find his comments about the process interesting.

Audiophiles eager to try DVD-Audio will have to wait just a bit longer. Matsushita Industrial Electric Co. and Japan Victor Company have decided to hold back their new DVD-A players, in the wake of the widely publicized decryption of the format's copy-protection scheme by a Norwegian computer hacker. The hacker published his workaround of the encryption on the Internet late in November.

As normally conceived, loudspeakers use electrodynamic forces to control the movements of their diaphragms, which in turn move air. Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. has come up with an interesting twist on this principle, one in which air pressure itself ("aerodynamic-drive technology") is used to control the diaphragm. The result is a transparent panel speaker called the "Sound Window," announced by the Japanese industrial giant March 27.

Remember FM radio's effect on college campuses years ago? Free music, usually without commercials (college stations are largely non-profit), and very flexible playlists made or broke new bands. Fast-forward to 2000. Students now spend most of their time downloading MP3 files for free over the Internet for playback on their computers. As before, new artists often benefit from this phenomena, but record companies are increasingly seeing the students as pirates rather than consumers.

German speaker and electronics manufacturer MBL Akustikgeräte has been acquired by MBL International GmbH, a new subsidiary of China’s Chow Tai Seng. MBL says the deal secures the company’s long-term future and is a step toward resolving ongoing insolvency proceedings.

Sunday, July 24, from 2-5pm, The Source A/V Design Group (3035 Kashiwa Street, Torrance CA 90505) will host an open house with the LA&OC Audio Society, MBL North America, and Kimber Kable. Ray Kimber, President of Kimber Kable, will talk about his new Axios headphone cables plus the properties and advantages in braided-wire technology while Jeremy Bryant, CEO of MBL North America, will present products from MBL's new Noble Line of electronics, including the N51 integrated amplifier, the N21 stereo amplifier, and the N31 DAC/CD player, using the unique, omnidirectional, MBL Radialstrahler loudspeakers.

Several weeks ago, we reportedhttp://www.stereophile.com/news/10211/">reported; on the revival of McCormack Audio by Bill Conrad and Lew Johnson, who purchased the company's assets at an auction in Southern California. This past week, McCormack Audio has announced that one of the original co-founders, Steve McCormack, has rejoined the company as Director of Research and Development. McCormack had worked at the company from its inception in 1982 until 1996.