High-end audio and the sad skeptics (Part 1)

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One day almost thirty years ago, in search of my favorite classical record magazine Gramophone, I walked in to the local high-end audio salon where it was readily available for sale every month. In the golden age of high-end audio of the seventies and eighties, Sound Components of Coral Gables was the premier store of its type in the Southeast, if not the country. The former owner of Sound Components, Peter McGrath, became one of the most sought after recording engineers, producing amazingly neutral, detailed, exquisite recordings. (McGrath currently works for Wilson Audio, the Holy Grail of high-end loudspeakers.) I own two of his recordings that are diametrically opposed musically -- solo lute music from the German Baroque and one of the best recordings ever of a Mahler symphony (the First) with James Judd and the Florida Philharmonic -- but produced with singularly accurate and natural sound.

But I digress.

As I walked in that day, I was stopped in my tracks by a piano recording that was so lifelike, so real, that I had to sit down to listen to it through its conclusion. I was hearing the second movement of Mozart's K.545 piano sonata played by the legendary Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau, a pianist I had the privilege of hearing live in Miami playing Liszt. This was an off-the-rack imported Philips LP (a 33.3 rpm long-playing vinyl record for those too young to know) playing on what was, arguably, one of two or three super-high resolution, stratospherically expensive (for then), two-channel audio systems: the Mark Levinson HQD system with a Linn Sondek LP12 turntable as the source. The speakers used in that system to reproduce the midrange, where most music exists, were two pairs of the legendary Quad ESL-57 electrostatic loudspeakers, probably the most neutral transducer ever designed. Without boring everyone with details that will mean nothing to anyone outside of this hobby, suffice it to say that listening to that recording on that system was a revelation, not because of loudness, or the allure of the gear (which was amazing), or anything like that. What impressed me was the perfectly realized illusion that Arrau was there in the store, in the flesh, playing on his Steinway, for me and the two employees who were there having a fast-food lunch.

Being very familiar with the sound of a piano in a real hall, listening to this record on that system was paradigm-shifting in its impact. I experienced something that forever changed the way I listened to recorded music. It relates directly to why I am an audiophile today, in a constant quest to improve the sound that approaches what is heard in a live performance.

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I purchased my first audio system in 1975. It consisted of a Scott 40wpc receiver -- H. H. Scott was as famous a manufacturer in its day as Marantz and Fisher -- a pair of Altec loudspeakers and a Garrard turntable. Simple for its day, about $500 total. Not expensive, but not cheap either. That system gave me enormous pleasure for many, many years. It wasn't until the advent of the compact disc in 1982 that I started to give a thought to changing my components. The CD had been touted as "perfect sound forever"; I thought they sounded like shit. Shrill, lifeless corpses containing what had once been music. Not even remotely close to a wonderful British EMI pressing or a Philips from Holland or the Tulip-clad DGs, pre-1964.

I was an analog holdout of the worst kind. I stubbornly refused to buy compact discs until 1987. As supplies of vinyl dwindled, and my LP collection stagnated due to enormous cuts in LP inventory and a lack of any new releases on LP, I gave in and bought my first CDs: Mahler's Ninth Symphony in a live performance by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic that was recorded the same year I had heard them play the very same work at Carnegie Hall, and Bruce Springteen's Born To Run, the quintessential rock album by The Boss. I justified my betrayal of analog because that specific Mahler performance was not available on LP. Remember, these were the days before eBay and Amazon.com when you actually had to go to a "record store" to browse and buy music.

Since I was not rich, the dreams of Levinson gear, Linn Sondeks, and Audio Research remained just that, dreams. Dreams that poor audiophiles have. My first CD player, a $300 Yamaha model, was selected because it was the best sounding of the ones I heard that I could afford. And $300 was not cheap. Frankly, I was disappointed. Its drawer mechanically failed after only one year and repairs were out of the question. I went to the store I bought it at and they gave me a brand spanking new Denon CD player. I also upgraded my receiver as well, a Denon also. Not high-end, but not a system you could buy at J. C. Penneys either. The digital sound was satisfactory, not great, but I still had thousands of LPs to choose from when I wanted listen to classical music and jazz. DGs, EMIs, Philips, German Pablo and ECM pressings with some of the most remarkable jazz performances of the seventies.

The death of two of my musical icons in 1989, Herbert von Karajan and Vladimir Horowitz, whom I had been fortunate enough to hear perform live before their deaths, were in a strange way a harbinger for what the nineties became for me as a music collector. I came to the conclusion that LPs were no longer going to made or sold again. (I was very wrong about that as we shall see later.) So I decided to go full bore and replace as many of my LPs with CDs as possible. In 1992 I decided to sell a big portion of my LP collection to a collector in Melbourne, Florida. He bought the whole shebang for about $500. I could now begin collecting anew, despite my misgivings about digital sound. I even got rid of my turntable, a Technics SP12 Mk.II with a Denon DL103 cartridge that had replaced my Garrard a few years before. (Direct-drive sucks.) I sold it so that there would be no going back to analog, the digital Rubicon crossed. "He that puts his hand to the plough, and looks back, is not fit for the kingdom of heaven." (Or so I thought...)

In order to get the most out of CDs, I started experimenting with different options I would read about in Stereophile and The Abso!ute Sound. In 1993 I swapped out my venerable Altecs for a pair of PSB Alphas, good bookshelf speakers that were very inexpensive and that sounded far superior to the Altecs in just about every way. Two years later I decided to buy a little device called a DAC-in-the-Box from a highly-praised company by the name of Audio Alchemy: a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) that would convert the digital stream from the CD player before reaching the receiver. It ended up being the best money I'd spent since moving over to the dark, er..., digital side: My CDs finally started sounding better. The harshness was almost, but not quite, gone. I could actually listen to an entire CD without that "digital fatigue" that so plagued the early discs and machines. I found that a good disc transport (my Denon) and a good DAC were the way to go to actually begin to approach improving digital sound.

Then, in 1998, I swapped my pair of PSBs for a new pair of loudspeakers that had been very highly reviewed by almost everyone. Since they were inexpensive (about $260 for the pair), I decided to switch. I bought a pair of B&W DM302s. Bowers & Wilkins are renowned for their superb speakers. These small masterpieces of loudspeaker design, even though they don't go comfortably below 60Hz, were superb in their ability to resolve music in the midrange. Just by changing my loudspeakers, albeit inexpensively, an amazing thing happened: these little speakers were so revealing that CDs I had thought sounded OK, started sounding like crap. What I once thought were good recordings and/or digital transfers, weren't so hot after all; great recordings (Harmonia Mundis, Audiofons, MFSLs) were amazingly good, better in fact, than I had heard them before. The staging opened up, the instruments were clearer, and that damned digital harshness was almost gone -- closer to analog, but no cigar. This proved to me that digital had enormous potential if done properly. I had made another vast improvement in my system for a small amount of money.

(As a side note, I still own the 302s and use them very successfully after almost ten years as my left and right front speakers in my 3.1 home theater. With a good subwoofer like my B&W ASW-650, these are killer loudspeakers.)

My purchase of the B&Ws led me to conclude that I needed to examine every single link in the chain to find out what could be improved upon. Did I need a sub? Was my Denon CD player pushing all of those ones and zeroes out properly? Should I upgrade my cables? Thus, I began the first leg of the quest I'm on today.

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So here I was, with a wife, a kid, a mortgage, one car payment, an old house that sucked money out of us occasionally like an Oreck vacuum cleaner, and very little discretionary funding to satisfy my hobby -- a hobby, I might add, that if taken to its extreme can cost in the (very) high hundreds of thousands of dollars. I kid you not.

I decided that I would start buying excellent gear, as needed, but used (or as the salesmen say, "pre-owned"). Perusing the listings on eBay in 2001, I came across a DAC made by California Audio Labs: the GAMMA. A highly regarded piece of gear that, for the price it was being sold for, would be a bargain addition to my system. Once again, despite what what the naysayers spout, the DAC made another improvement in my system, not earth-shattering but tangible. CDs that I considered references sounded very, very good, in fact, they sounded better than they had before. I retired the DAC-in-the-Box after many years of service.

Then, like someone who had once been suddenly afflicted with a rare, debilitating, recurring tropical disease, I a bad case of analog fever. It was bad. It weighed on me and weighed on me. Like Galileo who had recanted his findings to the Pope, I had recanted on my love of analog, and I was desperate to say, "but it does move!" So, going on ten years in 2002 that I had not had an analog source in my system, I decided to buy a new turntable. A Rega Planar 2 with an RB250 tonearm and a Grado cartridge. It was cheap, and it sounded it. (More on that later.) I still had a few of the precious LPs I had refused to part with (about 200 of them), but the new addition also meant I would have start to buying vinyl again...

My next foray into improving my system was a serendipitous conversation I had with one of the guys that worked in the classical and jazz departments at main local record store I'd been haunting since the seventies. He made a passing comment to me that he wanted me sell some of his LPs on eBay for him and asked me if I would interested in buying his (spare) CD player. (Yes, some of us have more than one player.) The CD player was a California Audio Labs DX-2, not one of the vacuum tube players CAL Audio made; nevertheless it was a one thousand dollar CD player he was selling for $300. Needless to say I jumped at the opportunity to see what a highly-rated, highly reviewed player would do (and I could compare the DX-2's built-in DAC with my Gamma).

Folks, I cannot overstate the difference this one component (purchased for $300) made in my system. This player proved to me that digital was not the devilish invention I once thought it was. Every one of the reference CDs I played sounded so fresh and so good -- sounded closer to analog than I had ever thought possible out of a compact disc.

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To be continued...

The successor to the Super Audio Compact Disc?

I love the sound of SACDs. Their availability, hampered by the unbridled stupidity of the music industry's approach to securing a successor to the (Red Book) Compact Disc, has been dismal. So it was with a little hope that I read this yesterday:

Blu-spec: Sony's latest CD format

by Steve Guttenberg

If CDs really are on their way out, Sony is ready with their replacement: Blu-spec CDs.

Although details about the new format, launched in Japan in November, are somewhat scant, we do know that users won't need a new player for Blu-spec CDs.

"The Blu-spec CD format boasts a new approach to the faithful reproduction of music by utilizing the leading-edge blue laser diode technologies optimized for the manufacturing of Blu-ray," according to CDJapan. The new discs' polycarbonate plastic, optimized for Blu-ray discs, is used "to ensure accurate reading of the data."

Sony doesn't claim that the Blu-spec CD sounds any better than a CD or how the new discs compare with Sony's previous and nearly dead super-CD format, Super Audio CD (SACD).

Although Sony made its Blu-spec PR splash in Japan, a few titles to the United States. The site lists Blu-spec CDs from Aerosmith, Jeff Beck, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, and Weather Report. While most Blu-spec CDs carry a list price of $25 in Japan, Amazon.com is selling them for $35.49 here.

Let's hope the music companies wake up and do it right this time.

A reading from the book of Operating Systems, Chapter 4

1 And the Lord, from His mountain, speaking through his prophet, did tell the Israelites, and Canannites, and Hashemites, and Yosemites, and Oregonians, and liberals and conservatives alike,

2 'Thou shalt purchase the Macintosh with OS X 10.5, for it is good in my sight. And thou shalt revel in its grace and simplicity and ease of use and power that cometh from me and from UNIX, that was spawned from me through AT&T.'

3 Then the Lord spoke angrily to his prophet and said, 'But, woe unto those who revel in the systems from the fallen angel vanquished from my sight who resideth in Redmond.

4 'Thou shalt take that Vistabomination and smite it with hammers, and thou shalt cleave it with an ax, and thou shalt run over it with carts lead by oxen, who will defecate upon it, and urinate upon it, and trample it over with their hooves. And this shall be good in my eyes.'

5 And the Lord then spake to his prophet anew upon shewing him the vision of the evil done on the land by Beelzegates and his minion Balmeriad. The prophet was frightened of the incompatibilities and crashes and lock-ups shewn to him and cowered.

6 And the Lord said, 'If thou cannot purchaseth a Macintosh, which is good in mine eyes, thou shalt find a good Intel computer and install Linux, or BSD, or other flavor of UNIX, the holy OS.'

7 The prophet asked why that would be good, and the Lord respondeth, 'Any OS that battles the abomination from Redmond is good in mine eyes.'

8 The prophet questioned not the wisdom of the Lord. He proceedeth to the holy place where Mac OS X and Linux were sold, and being obedient to the Lord did purchase the holy Mac, partitioned the holy hard drive and installed Linux alongside its bretheren Mac OS.

9 And the Lord smiled on the prophet.

Installing a PS Audio Soloist In-wall Line Conditioner (Updated)

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I’m pretty much a Miami, Florida, native, having lived here since 1962. My wife and I bought an old house in Miami in late December 1991, eight months before Hurricane Andrew hit. We still live in it, happily, even though we are out of space with all the stuff a married couple accumulates, including a baby boy in 1995.

The house proper is very well built. Built in 1949, it has sheet-rock/block/sheet-rock construction for all of the outside walls. The Miami old-timers knew how to build houses to withstand hurricanes. The previous owners converted the old screen porch in the back into an additional room. We call these rooms “Florida Rooms.” My Florida Room is not as well built as the rest of the house; it’s basically sheet-rock, 2x4s, and drywall on the inside. The sound of the winds coming from that room during Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and Hurricane Wilma in 2005 were, to say the least, disconcerting. But it’s still standing, thank God.

This is the room that I use as an office and music room since my son was born. I’m a little cramped in here, what with all my CDs, LPs, books, my Mac, etc., etc., but I love it. It’s my refuge, my own little “Man Camp,” unregulated by the boss and very libertarian. Even though I smoke cigarettes in here, I smoke cigars when I feel really brave.

My two-channel music system has been plagued by line noise for the longest time. I’ve tried a lot of inexpensive solutions -- better power cords being one solution -- to attempt to reduce the hum and noise, but none have really done the trick. I was always particularly annoyed when playing my Linn Sondek turntable. The hum and line noise were very bad.

When PS Audio's Paul McGowan mentioned in his August 2008 newsletter that he'd give away a PS Audio Soloist In-wall Conditioner to the first few to reply by email, I jumped at the opportunity. My only duty was to write this and report on improvements in the sound, if any. This was to be my experiment in determining whether the AC in my house is FUBAR, or whether an individual AC component solution would be the best bet.

Installation

The biggest concern I had about installing the Soloist was in the construction of the Florida Room for the reasons I mentioned above. I was right to be concerned since I discovered once I had removed the old outlet, I had metal tubing through where the lines were run that had were connected to a metal junction box. Not good. With a drywall saw I cut around the opening to expose the edges of the metal junction box. I spent the better part of an hour removing the metal box and freeing up the space in the wall. It was a bigger opening than I had hoped for but it was the best I could do under the circumstances. That’s why they make plaster, I guess.

I then attempted to install the blue plastic Carlson junction box that comes with the Soloist. Unfortunately, I had to hacksaw the rear half of the junction box off in order to run the wires with enough length so that I could then splice them to the Soloist. I cut the wires (white/white and black/black) and joined them with linesman pliers. Using the yellow wirenuts provided, I joined all three white wires together, then the three black wires together. I did not have a ground wire in my box so I left it unconnected from the Soloist. I screwed all four screws from the Soloist to the junction box, and I was done.

All in all, the Soloist installation was very easy. My total installation time was about two hours. In a prepared, exposed metal double-gang outlet with the wiring all done and pretty, though, the installation shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes, thirty tops. All the extra work you’ll have to do depends on the condition of the AC lines and walls in your home.

(Since originally installing it, I had an electrician replace the plastic box with a metal one and attach the ground wire. We also replastered the wall. This is what it looks like today.)


My system

• Classé Audio Model Thirty Stereo Line-Level Preamplifier
• Clearaudio Basic Stereo Phono-Stage Preamplifier
• Bryston 3B-ST Stereo Power Amplifier
• Marantz SA8260 Stereo Digital CD/SACD Transport with Digital-to-analog processor and DSD digital upsampler
• Linn Sondek LP12 Belt-Drive Turntable
• Grace G707 Radial Tracking Tonearm
• Sumiko Blue Point Special EVO-III Stereo High-Output Moving-Coil Cartridge
• Otari MX-5050BII-2 Professional 2-channel ½-track ¼-inch Analog Open-Reel Tape Recorder (7.5 ips/15 ips)
• Apple iMac Personal Computer with 1.25 TB external Firewire hard drive allocated for music files and spoken word
  
• Interconnects: Better Cables Silver Serpent II, PS Audio xStream Plus, Tributaries TOS-LINK, Mitch Cotter Triax Tonearm Cables, AudioQuest Sidewinder, Neutrik Balanced, StraightWire Symphony II,
• Monster MCX-1S Speaker Cables (1 bi-wired pair)
• PS Audio Soloist IC AC Power Conditioner & Cleaner
• PS Audio xStream Plus AC Power Cords
• Monster Power HT700 AC Power Surge Protector
• Bowers & Wilkins 804S Dynamic Loudspeakers (1 pair)
  

Listening

The first thing I noticed when I played a very well recorded Scott Hamilton cut I love is how much lower my noise floor is. Very impressive. And that was just from plugging my Monster Surge protector into the Soloist. I cranked each of my preamp inputs to max (without any sound, of course) and the [expletive deleted] hum I had heard on all outputs before the Soloist was pretty much gone. The sound is more open, as well. I am very impressed how much this little improvement has made.

My Linn Sondek is connected directly into the Soloist. Unfortunately, I still have a ground loop somewhere that hums when I touch the tonearm. However, that said, the table’s output is much, much quieter than before. The only change has been the Soloist. I listened to uncompressed digital Apple Lossless files from my Mac, two LPs, one CD, and one SACD I am very familiar with, one jazz, one rock, and two classical.

• Frank Sinatra - Come Fly With Me - EMI LP 180g remastering
• Shostakovich Symphony No.8 - Previn/LSO - HMV LP ASD-2917
• Beethoven Symphony No.5; Symphony No.7 - Kleiber/VPO - DGG CD 447-400.2
• Peter Gabriel - So - SACD
  

The improvement I heard on all of the recordings was not paradigm-shifting but it wasn’t subtle either. The reduced noise floor and total lack of hum greatly improved the sound of the system. The biggest improvements have been the output from my Mac and the turntable. I can’t overstate that the Linn output was very, very noisy before the Soloist. No more. Only the ground loop remains to be dealt with.

I have more listening to do, but I can heartily and unreservedly recommend this very inexpensive upgrade for anybody who may have less than the best AC power.

(Updated on April 25, 2009)

Karajan at 100: an appreciation

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I've been lucky to be around music all my life. My mother, a piano teacher, taught me about the greatness of the piano masters: Chopin, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Schumann, Mozart. Liszt. I heard the works of these great composers over many years when I was growing up. Sadly, I never learned to play the piano because I was too involved (read: lazy) with the stuff boys do when they're growing up. Though my tastes and hers have diverted greatly -- I love the piano compositions of Bartok and Ligeti (pieces she would detest as modern incarnations of the "anti-Chopin") and Monk -- she was the catalyst that made me appreciate and love music as much as I do.

At the age of sixteen, and quite by accident, I heard opera for the first time on the much-missed WTMI. What I heard that afternoon would become an obsession with classical music that I carry with me to this very day. The conductor I heard that afternoon leading Puccini's La Boheme (with Luciano Pavarotti and Mirella Freni) with the Berlin Philharmonic celebrates his centenary today: Herbert von Karajan.

Herbert von Karajan (1908-1989) was a controversial figure throughout his life. His membership in the Nazi party has been overblown and used as a club to invalidate his life's work; no one ever seems to recall that Karajan married a Jewish woman in 1943 and fled Germany because of it. The controversy, as Richard Osborne wrote about in the biography, Karajan: A Life in Music, was more a result of the musical forces siding with Wilhelm Furtwängler, jealousy and envy, the main motivating factors.

In any event, there is no doubt that he was the most influential conductor of the 20th century, creating a recorded legacy with the Philharmonia Orchestra, and the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics that is legendary.

I have heard (and own) just about every Karajan recording. While I must honestly admit that some of his later recordings (after 1980) were not as vital and immediate as his earlier Philharmonia and Berlin recordings, his place in music history is undiminished. He recorded the greatest Beethoven Symphony cycle (1963) and the best Brahms cycle (1964), Schumann, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, the greatest Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss ever recorded, Debussy's La Mer, the Sibelius Fourth and Fifth, and Mahler recordings (the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Ninth and Das Lied von der Erde) that in many ways validated Karajan's tenure with the BPO.

I was fortunate enough to hear Karajan conduct the Berlin Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1982 on October 22nd (the Brahms First and Third) and on the 23rd (the Mahler Ninth). The latter remains to this day the greatest concert experience of my life. If anyone ever tells you that Karajan's conducting was cold, calculating and lifeless, then they never heard him and his orchestra live. It was a magisterial performance of the Ninth, especially the final adagio that ended almost as wisps of smoke -- ethereal is the only word I can think that can describe it -- played pppp, and full of the longing for life, knowing it's end is near, that Mahler wrote into this work. I'll never forget it. His live recording of the symphony on Deutsche Grammophon comes very close to what I heard that night in 1982.

And, of course, there's opera. So many great recordings. His singers adored him and he was a master at making opera a "theater" experience. My favorites? La Boheme, Madama Butterfly, incandescent readings that are unsurpassed, a Rosenkavalier from the fifties that is so beatifully played and sung you'd think the angels were singing it; an Otello from the early sixties that brims with the power and underlying anger in the work; Debussy's Pelleas et Mellisande, a great Don Giovanni, and of course, Wagner. One of the greatest of the complete Ring cycles (I own five, Karajan, Solti, Keilberth, Levine and Boulez) ever made.

In the end, the recordings stand the test of time. They are a legacy of superb music making that will not be forgotten. Thank you maestro for the thirty plus years of great music you gave to me.

The iPhone is a (r)evolutionary device

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Last Saturday I purchased an iPhone and ended my four-year hellish experience with Motorola phones. Before I begin describing what a revolutionary and evolutionary device the iPhone is, let me make my parting comments about Motorola.

Motorola has been living off their (undeserved) reputation for a long time. I owned a Motorola i730 from 2004 through 2006 (two different phones because of "firmware issues") and a V3c RAZR from 2006 through this year (also, two different phones because of "firmware issues" -- do I see a trend here?). Both were crappy products with lousy software, and GUIs that appear they were designed by imbeciles for imbeciles. Suffice to say I will never buy one of their products ever again. And, if recent news articles are true that Motorola's cell phone sales have plummeted because of customer dissatisfaction, I'm not the only one thinking that.

(Note to Verizon Wireless: your disabling my ability to copy my pictures from my phone to my desktop because of your desire to cross-sell me a crappy picture service I wouldn't have used anyway, makes you not only greedy, but stupid and incredibly short-sighted. Now that I know that you think your customers are idiots, I won't be coming back. Your signal was pretty darn good, though.)

I've had a week to work and play with the iPhone and it's a marvel. This is the first time I have used a cell phone where I can honestly say it was a pleasure. It has a large easy-to-use keypad for dialing, it's loud enough to hear in traffic, it sports a wonderful interface that is intuitive and easy to use (thanks to the OS masters at Apple Inc.). You can add IMAP (or POP) email accounts in a flash (I have five accounts, including my work account, and it was easy as pie to set them all up), a superb calendar, a notes application, and a lot more. The keyboard is just fine for me, but I know some people have complained that the placement of the keys are too close together.

Oh, and did I tell you it's an iPod as well? That's icing.

The iPhone has one major weakness, though: battery life. It eats battery power. I stopped using it as an iPod the third day I had it because the charge did not last ten hours. If you listen to your music or podcasts for longer than three hours a day, and intend to use it for everything else it does, forget about it. If this is going to be your only device, that is, if you plan to use it as a cell phone, an iPod, as your primary email client, your calendar, etc., I suggest you buy a crapload of chargers and have one wherever you place it. For me that's not a big deal because I have an iPod and I'll still use that. The other major weakness is the crappy AT&T EDGE network. Very slow. I should have waited for the G3 version, but using my RAZR was becoming hazardous to my mental health.

This device has revolutionized cell phone design and has everyone else scrambling to top it (fat chance). Apple correctly saw that the ubiquitous cell phone had to evolve into something else, something that was so useful, and that would become so necessary to help us run our digital life, that it would be unthinkable without it. I think they succeeded admirably.

Give it a test drive. I'm warning you, though, if you use it for more than an hour to its full potential, you will never be able to go back to your old-fashioned cell phone.

The European Union as Don Barzini

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As much as I dislike their products, the attention paid to Microsoft by controlling legal authorities here (during the Reno years) and in Europe have been repulsive, anti-market moves against a company that wishes to protect its intellectual property. Europe sounds a lot like Don Barzini in The Godfather:

Times have changed. It's not like the Old Days -- when we can do anything we want. A refusal is not the act of a friend. If Don Corleone had all the judges, and the politicians in New York, then he must share them, or let us others use them. He must let us draw the water from the well. Certainly he can -- present a bill for such services; after all -- we are not Communists.

So here is the decision from Europe:

LUXEMBOURG (AP) - Microsoft lost its appeal of a European antitrust order Monday that obliges the technology giant to share communications code with rivals, sell a copy of Windows without Media Player and pay a $613 million fine - the largest ever by EU regulators.

The EU Court of First Instance ruled against Microsoft on both parts of the case, saying the European Commission was correct in concluding that Microsoft was guilty of monopoly abuse in trying to use its power over desktop computers to muscle into server software.

It also said regulators had clearly demonstrated that selling media software with Windows had damaged rivals.

"The court observes that it is beyond dispute that in consequence of the tying consumers are unable to acquire the Windows operating system without simultaneously acquiring Windows Media Player," it said.

"In that regard, the court considers that neither the fact that Microsoft does not charge a separate price for Windows Media Player nor the fact that consumers are not obliged to use that Media Player is irrelevant."

And this:

In its 248-page ruling, the court upheld both the Commission's argument and its order for Microsoft to hand over information on server protocols to rivals. Microsoft had claimed these were protected by patents and the Commission was forcing it to give away valuable intellectual property at little or no cost.

The court confirmed "that the necessary degree of interoperability required by the Commission is well founded and that there is no inconsistency between that degree of interoperability and the remedy imposed by the Commission.

Read the entire ludicrous thing here. As someone who has been in the software biz for many years, this decision is an ominous shot across the bow to anyone doing business in Europe. My word of warning: Look out Apple; they may be coming after you next...