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Let's do the It's a Wonderful Life exercise, shall we? Imagine what popular music would sound like today without Jerry Wexler. Aretha Franklin would have never returned to her gospel roots, Ray Charles would have continued imitating Charles Brown and Nat Cole, Stax would have been a tiny regional record label, and denatured white covers of R&B songs would dominate the charts. In fact, the music we know today as rhythm and blues would still be called "race music"—Wexler having coined R&B while working at Billboard in 1949.

It may be true that baby-boomers yearn to relive their childhoods, but how many aging wanted-to-be rock stars and music lovers still like to play with dolls? McFarlane">http://www.spawn.com">McFarlane Toys, which made its mark creating and marketing Spawn merchandise, is hoping quite a few.

At CES2006, we were pleasantly surprised to encounter Jim Shannon in Quartet Marketing Group's exhibit room at the Alexis Villas. "What are you doing these days?" we asked. He gestured around the room. "I'm a partner in Quartet," he said. "I've been here since July."

Jimmy Martin, the self-styled "King of Bluegrass," died at a hospice near his home in Hermitage, TN on May 14. Martin had been diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2003, but the progress of the disease was slow, and the first of two hospice stays was cut short by an apparent recovery. Significantly, Martin never gave up his plans to perform at this year's Bill Monroe Bluegrass Festival in Bean Blossom, IN.

Poor Jimmy Page. After listening to eight tracks from the newly remastered Led Zeppelin studio albums from Atlantic/Swan Song/Rhino, the first three of which, I, II, III, will be released on June 3, the guitar great graciously opened himself to questions. Were the alternate takes, that are the meat of the “companion audio” disc that accompanies each original album, pieced together from a number of alternate takes?

For years, there has been concern in the high-end audio press about the effects of jitter on digital audio. Manufacturers spend countless design hours measuring jitter and trying to minimize its influence on the sound of their products.

Kalman Rubinson enthused over JL Audio's Fathom f113 powered subwoofer in his November "Music in the Round" column. Unfortunately, brainfade on my part when I wrote the text for the cover of that issue of Stereophile meant that the subwoofer was credited to "JL Labs." And in all the proof-reading that goes on while an issue of the magazine is being prepared, we all noted a) that the words "JL Labs" were both spelled correctly on the cover and b) that the words "JL Audio" were also spelled correctly on the contents page and all the way through Kals's column.