1. At the bulletin board is a list of equipment, accessories, tape etc donated to the BAS by John Di Leo. All offers, including zero, will be considered. All proceeds benefit the BAS. Contact me for information.

2. An agreement between musicians union and 66 of the most prestigious American orchestras including the NY Phil and chicago Symphony opens the way for them to make their performanes available on the Internet. The performances would include recordings that could be downloaded and live concerts. (NYT Jun13,00)

3. Gary Galo reviews two CD repair kits (also good for DVDs) in the 4/00 Audio Electronics (formerly Audio Amateur). They are DiscRestore ($14.95) and SkipDoctor ($34.99). DiscRestore is manual system with fluids and polishing clothes. SkipDoctor uses a handcranked polishing tool. He concludes that both are effective with moderately scratched discs. DiscRestore: (408)298-9008, SkipDoctor: www.digitalinnovations.com.

4. EQ mag for June 2000 featured a shootout between 33 mike preamps. Some attempt at objective testing was made by matching the levels to .02 dB, blind testing, and covering the preamps with a black cloth. However the source was a range of microphones with a live vocalist or instrumentalist performing the same music over and over! The variability of the live performance would swamp the tiny differences in the preamps, in my opinion. A pair of CDs will be available of the tests: www.3daudioinc.com. It would have been informative to measure the frequency response of the preamps with the microphone attached using a signal injection technique, i.e. through a small value resistor in series with the mike feed. The output impedance of mikes having transformer coupled outputs can vary with frequency and cause frequency response differences to appear with different preamp input loadings. Since they were testing preamps, not microphones, a recorded source could have used (still using the signal injection method), eliminating the variability of a live performer. Obviously an enormous amount of work was put into this project, to no avail.