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1.  Under the header, "BSO Lawyers not feeling festive", the Globe reports that lawyers for the Boston Symphony Orchestra filed a suit yesterday in Boston's federal court seeking to stop a Connecticut arts group from calling its two-day festival "Jewish Tanglewood" and from having the website www.jewishtanglewood.com. A New England Jewish Music & Arts Festival spokesman said yesterday the title was really a nickname of sorts, given to the six-year-old event by a New York reporter in a story a few years ago. The festival had removed "Tanglewood" from the brochure, but continued to operate the website with a 2002 copyright notation for Jewish Tanglewood. 17My03

2.  The Fostex VF160 Multitrack Recorder/Mixer, reviewed in Pro Audio Review (Jl03), looks promising for a replacement for tape based recording systems. It uses a 30GB hard drive to record up to 16 tracks live (8 channels of mike inputs, 8 channels of digital I/O using ADAT format) and can mix down, add EQ and DSP, and record to CDR with the internal Plextor CD burner, all for $899. It is 16 bit. It performed flawlessly in the reviewer's tests. www.fostex.com

3.  A while back I purchased some computer loudspeakers with subwoofer (Aspect 30). With the treble turned all the way down, they have been satisfactory for general use including editing audio files. I eventually noticed a "one note" bass, causing a boom at a specific frequency. Finally I did some measurements and found it was +12 dB at 167 Hz in the satellites, with a smaller peak at 63 in the sub. I finally decided to do something about it and used a simple cookbook active equalizer circuit to generate an inverse curve with Q and amplitude adjusted to cancel out the speaker's peaks. The result is +-2dB from 50 to 1000 Hz, using some bass boost from the speaker's controls (which was not feasible before). Not bad for $40 speakers. I will write up the design for the BASS.

4.  Recently I read Edward Bellamy's utopian novel, Looking Backward 2000-1887 (published in 1888). (Webmasters note: link to online novel or at Amazon.com) He described a music distribution system using rooms all around the city with musicians playing night and day. Telephone wires brought the sound into the individual's rooms where the y could choose between instrumental and vocal, different sorts of instruments, and different moods from grave to gay. Says our protagonist (from 1888): "It appears to me...that if we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained, and ceased to strive for further improvements." We do tend to take what we have for granted.

David Hadaway

President, Boston Audio Society