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Two unusual download sites now offer high-resolution 24-bit files for audiophiles with a taste for adventure. The first, the UK's B&W">http://www.bowers-wilkins.co.uk/sos">B&W Music Club, is a one-album-per-month subscription service that premieres complete, audiophile-quality albums in a wide variety of genres chosen and recorded by "curator" Peter Gabriel. The second, HifiTrack.comhttp://www.hifitrack.com/en/">HifiTrack.com;, is a Hong Kong-based site that offers Chinese and Asian traditional and pop music, Zen and meditation music, and Chinese-flavored Western pop, jazz, and classical.

Saturday, March 3, 3–9pm: The Audio Doctor (112 Sherman Place, Jersey City, NJ) will host an evening of music featuring amplification and sources from Unison Research. Three systems will be utilized, and there will be three separate showings: 3pm, 6pm, and 8:30pm.

Gear will include Unison’s S6 integrated amplifier, Primo amplifier and CD player/DAC, and Unico 50 CDE CD player/DAC; loudspeakers will include models from KEF and Dali. Dave Lalin of the Audio Doctor and Colleen Cardas of Colleen Cardas Imports will be on hand to present the systems.

Space is limited; RSVP with the time slot that works best for you. For more info, e-mail sales@audiodoctor.com, call (877) 428-2873, or visit the Audio Doctor.

Major music companies may have conspired to keep CD prices artificially high in the United Kingdom by limiting cheaper imports. That's the presumption behind an inquiry launched February 9 by the British government's Office of Fair Trade.

SACD partisans Sony and Philips continue to release new disc players that also decode DVD-Video, but not DVD-Audio. And arch-DVD-A supporter Meridian, as well as companies such as McIntosh, are releasing DVD-A and DVD-V players that don't do SACD. But there are exceptions, notably Pioneerhttp://www.pioneerelectronics.com">Pioneer;, who debuted the first widely available "universal" player, the DV-AX10">http://www.stereophile.com//digitalsourcereviews/515/">DV-AX10 SACD/DVD-A/CD player, last year.

Last year in late October, Universal Music Group finally announcedhttp://www.stereophile.com/news/11476/">announced; its first set of SACD titles and the high-rez format's supporters jumped for joy. Then, at the January 2003 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Universal stood on the podium next to Sony and announced several key SACD releases from the Police, Peter Gabriel, and others.

Real businesses are moving into territory explored by the upstarts. On August 2, Universal">http://www.umusic.com/">Universal Music Group, the world's largest record label, announced that it will begin offering, on a trial basis, digital downloads of recordings from its massive catalog. The experiment is scheduled to begin this week, with an initial offering of about 60 songs from artists in several genres, including operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti, jazz guitarist George Benson, and pop band Blink 182.

Have the format wars begun in earnest? Only a few days after Warner Brothers announced the DVD-Audio release of Paul Simon's You're the One, Universal">http://www.umusic.com">Universal Music Group announced its plan to release titles in the Super Audio CD format.