Wes Phillips

On March 22, it was announced that the Custom Electronic Design and Installation Association (CEDIA) had received another ruling in its favor from the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board in the action brought against it by Bose Corporation to cancel CEDIA's trademark registrations for the phrase "Electronic Lifestyles." The Board denied Bose's motion for summary judgment and declined to consider fraud claims against CEDIA regarding the registrations.

Consider the lowly spork, that modern marvel of versatility: half spoon, half fork. In theory, you should be able to eat just about anything short of a flank steak with it. But the sad fact is, whether you're eating soup or salad, you might as well try to shovel it in using a tongue depressor. The damn thing's so versatile, it almost doesn't work at all. There's a lot to be said for specialization.

Convinced that your favorite music would have sounded even better if <I>you'd</I> been the mixing engineer? UmixIt Technologies is going to let you put your money where your mouth is.

Researchers at the International Center for Hearing and Speech Research (ICHSR) have found that age-related hearing loss may be all (or at least mostly) in your head rather than a problem with your ears.

As rules of thumb go, this one is pretty infallible: By the time we've heard about it, a trend's hippest participants will think it's on the decline. That means that <I>mashups</I>, or the manipulation of the musical genetic material of several different songs to create a new song, may be on their way out, because <I>we've</I> become infatuated with them.

Last month, we <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/news/012405roundup/">reported</A&gt; that audio engineers with a yen for magnetic tape were hoarding their remaining stockpiles in the wake of the Chapter 11 restructuring&ndash;inspired shutdown of the <A HREF="http://www.quantegy.com">Quantegy</A&gt; plant in Opelika, Alabama. What a difference a month makes! Two new sources have come to the rescue.

<A HREF="http://www.stereophile.com/interviews/117">Paul Hales</A> does things differently. "I set out to build a true reference speaker," he asserted when I asked him about the, er, <I>concept</I> behind his Concept Five loudspeaker. For a mere six grand? The other guys don't even blink at $20k, $30k, even $70k statement speakers.