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It was a question I hadn't considered until I stepped into the listening room on that gloomy Monday morning to greet my Canadian guests. Then it hit me like a slap shot to the forehead. Could I be the unbiased, emotionally unruffled reviewer that I know I am on this day, or was my bitterness simply too strong to give these visitors their fair shake? For you see, it was less than 24 hours earlier that one of the most important games in North American hockey history—the gold-medal final between the United States and Canada—had ended in utter disappointment for the Stars and Stripes. And now, these Canadian speakers were staring me right in the face—their phase plugs pointing at me in ridicule, their ports directing a sly, triumphant wink my way, and their cabinets standing a little taller and straighter after 50 years of Olympic-hockey frustration. My doubts quickly passed, though, as my foreign guests began expertly filling the room with the soothing sounds of the Mississippi delta and Virginia mountains, bringing an undeniable calm over me—even a hint of resignation. As much as I love hockey, it's their game, after all. If Canada starts beating us in football or baseball, I'll know the sports gods have really turned their backs on the good old U.S. of A.

Unbelievably, in the distant past, primitive humans had to get up and walk across the room to change channels on their TVs. Then they invented fire - and remote controls. Today, languishing in our high-tech La-Z-Boy recliners, we wonder how our ancestors ever survived. From our sedentary positions, we also wonder why we seem to gain an extra pound every weekend.

The steady progression of compressed digital audio into all sorts of places (do you really need to listen to Mozart on a PDA?) is raising all sorts of issues. But none is more important to readers of Sound & Vision than the ability of the codecs - the encode/decode software - to faithfully reproduce music after compressing CD tracks to file sizes that can be easily downloaded or stored.

Only a few short years ago, home networking was heralded as an inevitability, with manufacturers and research groups rushing to establish standards and technologies for new, connected products. But as the battle for the living room heats up, a recent study suggests that more than half of tech-savvy consumers in the US are currently indifferent to the benefits that a networked home might offer.