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MP3 audio files have quickly become the dominant format for downloading music over the Internet, and have just as quickly raised the ire of music labels and artists looking to protect their musical assets. For example, a petition signed by nearly 400 European recording artists (including Mstislav Rostropovich and Barbara Hendricks) was handed to the European Parliament last Tuesday by French composer Jean-Michel Jarre to protest lax copyright protections exacerbated by digital technology. The petition states, in part, "We want to use new digital technologies like the Internet to create and to deliver our music, but we will only feel confident doing so if we know that the laws are there to stop our works falling victim to pirates."

Lexington, KY–based Thiel">www.thielaudio.com">Thiel Audio has announced a new line of SmartSub subwoofers, "designed as the ultimate solution for bass management and reproduction in home theater and music sound systems." The line includes the SS1, SS2, SS3, and SS4 subwoofers, the SmartSub Integrator, and the PX02 and PX05 Passive Crossovers, a group of products said "to offer the most seamless and realistic low frequency reproduction possible." Company president Kathy Gornik describes the new line as "the world's first intelligent subwoofers."

Manufacturers sometimes suspect that they have been intentionally slighted if they don't get mentioned in a Stereophile show report. The truth is that the overwhelming enormity of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) prevents even the most aggressive journalists from seeing everything. (SGHT editor Tom Norton may be the sole exception.)

Stick it in your wall: Polk Audio has introduced three new subwoofers aimed at the custom installation market. The $600 CSW88 is a sealed in-wall model featuring dual 8" long-throw, shallow-basket woofers mounted behind a metal pressure plate. Its enclosure is constructed from MDF with 1/8" aluminum panels. It is designed to fit within standard stud-wall construction, measuring 60" (H) by 13.5" (W) by 3.5" (D). Rather than a grille, the CSW utilizes a vent, which, not at all coincidentally, measures the same as a standard 10" by 4" heating vent. Inputs on the top and bottom of the enclosure simplify wiring.

McIntosh">http://www.mcintoshlabs.com/">McIntosh Laboratory unveiled for the press three new products that they will be showing at CEDIA next month. They are the MX135 A/V Control Center (already shipping), the MVP861 Universal Player, and the MC207 7-channel Power Amplifier, all with McIntosh's signature design and cosmetics.

The high-end audio industry may be in a slump, but the public's appetite for recorded music appears as voracious as ever. MP3, the hottest upstart in the digital audio market, got a big boost in late June when Diamond">http://www.diamondmm.com/">Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc. announced the next generation of its popular Rio digital music player, the Rio PMP 500, due to arrive in stores this fall.

"Rarely, if ever, can this densely written sonata have been presented so lucidly with each note precisely in place...the dramatic and lyrical aspects were never slighted or taken for granted."
—Peter G. Davis, writing in the New York Times about Robert Silverman's New York debut in 1978, when he performed the Liszt B-Minor Piano Sonata in Alice Tully Hall.