SURVEYING THE SOUNDSCAPE.(products at the 2001 Consumer Electronics Show)

I've felt like a stranger in my own land at the past few Consumer Electronics Shows. No one cared to remember that the root of all consumer electronics was Edison's cylinder phonograph and all audio seemed useful for was supporting video viewing with clamorous sound effects.

But in 2001, the industry woke up and heard the music. The CES once again swung and rocked and classicked and countried and hipped and hopped. And even overheard an obviously digital era guy saying to a buddy, "Video and surround sound are great, but music is what it's really all about. The music will always be there."

And guess what. This resurgence of the music wasn't due to a new wave of miniwatt single ended triode amplifiers. It wasn't because of yet another breakthrough in loudspeaker design. It wasn't even because of DVD-Audio or Super Audio CD. It was--and is--music on the internet.

That was a hard thing for me to accept. I've been a vocal critic of "convergence"--the intrusion of computer technology into the purity of our audio systems. I feared that the computer juggernaut was threatening to overrun and overwhelm our music listening experiences.

I'm amazed to see a very different scenario. Computer technology is politely approaching audio with hat in hand, clearly ready to behave itself and hoping to be accepted--perhaps even respected--by that most mature category of consumer electronics.

There's so much more than MP3 and Napster to talk about, too. All sorts of music sources exist online, including hundreds of radio stations around the world that make their signals available over the Internet. I'm particularly enjoying the one that resulted from a total reorganization of Toronto's CJRT-FM classical and jazz station into an (almost) all-jazz service that anyone can pick up as http://www.jazz.fm. And now you don't have to be sitting in front of a computer to do it.

To get to internet music without dealing with a PC, you need an internet account and one of an extremely diverse selection of standalone Internet music products. They were all over the CES. Some have tuners that patch into your stereo system like regular tuners. Some are like mini systems with their own amplifiers and speakers. Some look like and work like table radios.