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With $60,000 in award money as incentive, the hacker community is helping the Secure">http://www.sdmi.org/">Secure Digital Music Initiative find out just how secure six proposed watermarking technologies really are. On October 12, as SDMI representatives were testinghttp://www.stereophile.com/news/10870/">testing; the audibility of three of the watermarks, the organization announced the closure of a month-long challenge it had offered hackers: break the code. According to the terms of the challenge, each defeated technology will mean $10,000 to a successful hacker.

Which has more value in the 21st century: the constitutionally-guaranteed right to free speech or the music industry's right to protect its encryption technology? Princeton University professor Edward W. Felten intends to find out.

Phase One of the Secure">http://sdmi.org/">Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) will incorporate watermarking technology for DVD-Audio from Verance">http://www.verance.com/">Verance Corporation. The agreement was announced at a meeting of the SDMI in Hawaii early in December. Verance Corp. was formed recently by the merger of ARIS Technologies Corporation and Solana Technology Development Corp. ARIS's technology was announced a few months ago as the SDMI's choice for watermarking.

The Secure">http://www.sdmi.org/">Secure Digital Music Initiative's move to establish a copy-prevention technology for commercial recordings has rankled audio engineers, who claim that the audible watermarking technique chosen by the organization could mar high-resolution recordings. Of particular concern are SDMI's testing methods and its rush to get a standard in place without commentary from engineers or the music-buying public.

Last year the music industry was jolted from its complacency by the rise of MP3, a scheme for the quick and easy transfer of digital audio files over the Internet. Legal attempts to block the format as a form of copyright violation failed, and the industry began scrambling to find a way to prevent the wholesale piracy of higher-resolution formats to come. The Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), an alliance of more than 240 hardware, software, and music-publishing companies, has been working overtime trying to develop an unobtrusive technique for preventing unauthorized copying—something that digital technology is making easier than ever.

The world of loudspeaker aficionados has at one end most of us, who use multi-way box speakers of one kind of another; in the center are the lovers of panels, electrostatic, planar magnetics—it doesn't matter as much as the fact there is no box—and at the extreme other end are the lovers of high-sensitivity designs, where massive amounts of art, artifice, and loving care are applied to wrest full-range sound from a single drive-unit. Overcoming the daunting problems of getting a single drive-unit to work from 20Hz to 20kHz is, by those, felt to be outweighed by the benefits of not having a crossover circuit.

That harmonious accord between SoundExchange and the Digital Media Association (DiMA) on webcasting that we reportedhttp://stereophile.com/news/071607internet/">reported; last week? Apparently not so harmonious—and possibly not even an accord.