Foiled Again by … Fingerprints

Doh!

We are slowly creating an online catalog of the products we carry in order to provide both a more traditional presentation in this online medium and as a way to show off how awesome some of this equipment is.

But one of the problems with all this nice, shiny equipment is that when one has to move it, adjust it, or do ANTTHING with it, one leaves finger prints. Big honkin’ smudges. This is similar to the dreaded dust buildup problem, except that it is harder to remedy (The hell if I am going to wear gloves to use my equipment, no way no how 🙂 )

Turntable with fingerprint smudges on the side of the platter
For example, in the catlog there is the picture of the Brinkmann Balance turntable. Nice picture I think. Spent the time to remove the background in Photoshop, added it to the webpages and then uploaded them – only to finally notice after all this that there are smudges on the platter where someone was too impatient to wait for it to slow down and used their fingers to force it to stop. [This photo was taken at the HE 2005 show – so it wasn’t me who was the impatient one… this time 🙂 ]

This isn’t the only piece in the catalog that had finger prints that stood out like a sore thumb. But the others I was able to use photoshop to dissapear them.

So, I’ll take another picture of the Balance we have here and redo the picture – but the real problem is that finger prints are all over our equipment, as they probably are all over yours, and all these smudges distract from the visual aesthetic of the pieces and of the overall listening experience. But in reality we are just too lazy and too ‘the visual aesthetics shouldn’t matter – its the music stupid’ that this will not likely change here any time soon at the Audio Federation.

But if someone came out with an audiophile-grade equipment polish – say Walker Audio, it could come with the VIVID CD polisher and the SST silver contact enhancer – then I bet we could convince one of us here (not me) to spend the time and apply the polish very few weeks, and remove the fingerprints so that my photos would not be pictures of equipment with fingerprints all over them.

What do you say, you entrepreneurs out there? Let me know when it ships!