News

As we enter the week of The Home Entertainment Show (HE2005), you can almost hear the audio industry holding its breath, waiting for the Show's April 28 opening date to announce new products, alliances, and strategies. However, despite the lack of hard news coming across the www.stereophile.com newsdesk this week, we have been receiving almost daily hints concerning the must-hear products and rooms awaiting us at the Hilton New York Hotel.

When I submitted my Records 2 Die 4 selections this past winter, it seemed inevitable that I include a web radio station. Not only had I enjoyed listening to www.techwebsound.comhttp://www.techwebsound.com">www.techwebsound.com; more than anything else last year, but it had exposed me to more new music and led to more music purchases than any other source—by a wide margin.

Hot Licks: Add another title to UmixIt'shttp://stereophile.com/news/032105umixit/">UmixIt's; catalog of DualDisc Enhanced DVD/CDs: Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry's eponymous solo album, his first since 1984.

On April 14, Krell Industries invited the New York–based audio press to its first-ever American demonstration of its Evolution electronics separates, at Sound By Singer. In a surprise move, the company also debuted a complete "re-imagining" of its flagship loudspeaker, the LAT-1:">http://www.stereophile.com/loudspeakerreviews/382">LAT-1: the $55,000/pair LAT-1000. "We set out to improve the LAT-1," Krell CEO Dan D’Agostino said, "and in the end, probably the only parts we retained from the original design were the top and bottom panels. The LAT-1000 is essentially a completely new design—although it does retain the same footprint as the LAT-1, since that proved so popular in Japan that we didn't want to mess with it." And, he said, patting the aluminum top-plate, "Let me tell you, it was hard to pack all of this new technology into a package this size."

The Home">http://www.he2005.com">Home Entertainment Show, scheduled to take place in NYC April 28–May 1, is only weeks away! Throughout the Show, ticket holders can experience the finest consumer electronics and convergence products on the planet—PLUS enjoy a variety of live music performances by popular jazz, folk, rap, blues, and classical music recording artists.

As Jon Iverson points out in another">http://www.stereophile.com/news/041105serving">another posting this week, a surprising number of readers expect downloads to be a viable music acquisition option in the very near future. Perhaps it's closer than we think.

On Tuesday, March 29, 2005, the US Supreme Court heard the oral arguments for the case of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. This was widely covered in the mainstream news media, as well as all over the Web, but none of the synopses of the case did true justice to the give-and-take of the arguments, as I discovered this week when I stumbled upon a .pdf transcription of the complete oral arguments.