We are Remastering the Website
The Audio Federation website is always trying to maintain a balance so that it serves equally well all the different kinds of visitors we get: customers and audiophiles, the hobbiest and the merely curious, those looking for information and those looking for audio por*n/photos.
Finally happy with the look of the home page, and we’ll probably keep it until at least June, if not longer.
We added a Site Map page accessible from the home page to make it easier to get around – which I even find myself using more and more. The links at the top of each page in the dealership now let one easily get back to the home (top) page.
The Music page will evolve to become an annotated index into the Blog’s forthcoming posts of audiophile-relevent music reviews. Our emphasis will be somewhat different than other music reviews, focusing on the quality of the sound more than the history of the band or how the album fits within the bands other work, or fits within the genre as a whole. Not that this other information isn’t interesting – it is that it is already done quite well by others in the industry, and no reason for us to duplicate or detract from their good work
The Hifi’ing Magazine will evolve into being not only a list of recent show reports but an annotated index into the Blog so that people can more easily find ‘major Blog posts in history’.
The Audiophile’s Guide to the Galaxy will be updated, both visually and content-wise. Finally.
We’ve added a number of photo galleries to the dealership product pages, and these will get fleshed out a lot more with both pictures that we take here and those we have taken, and will take, at shows.
We’ve also started adding ‘experience reports’ to the dealership’s product pages, which collect and display information about our experiences with the various products in several situations. The HRS vibration control product line is the first of many products we will do this for.
Neli will start working a lot more on the website; she knows a lot more details about most of the products than I do.
This means letting Neli have access to the website. I can just see it now. If you notice some descriptions going back and forth between say “lovely and detailed” on the one hand and “rich and detailed” on the other – you will know it is one of THOSE types of discussions going on here on the other side of your computer.
This is kind of like lending your spouse the keys to your Lamborghini (well, let’s just imagine we all had a Lamborghini, OK, and thatmost of us hadn’t spent all our money on audio equipment and $30 a pop LPs). How many times can you say ‘pleeeeease don’t break it dear’ before you get one of those matrimonial Death Ray looks? Once? Yeah, that is the way it works here, too.
I do try to get her to post her ideas on this blog…at least once a day, (and sometimes hourly. This nets me another kind of look). She made her own trip to Planet Abraxus, and to planet [whatever opera Mike Lavigne was playing the last hour of CES in the Swedish Statement room] and I am sure people would like to hear what she has to say about it.
But she is more comfortable talking about audio than writing about it, the opposite of her way too softly spoken husband. So it will still mostly be me who is posting stuff on the Blog about the ‘goings on’ here at the Belfry – with hopefully some occasional posts by Neli, and perhaps even some special guests, from time to time.
If you have any other ideas, please let us know. Thanks!
*** Audio Federation’s Music Favorites
Hm, quite scare listing, isn’t?
The Cat
Hi Romy,
Not sure if you meant scarey or scarce – but I could see how it might seem to be both 🙂
The list of favorites are a list of albums that we have found a large cross section of people to like. They are also all high-quality and quite whimsical in some way or another.
I may perhaps talk about some of my personal favorites: Pink Floyd bootlegs of their very, very early, intensely innovative, live shows. Or intensely poinient(?) Furtwangler conducting Beethoven in 1942 in front of the Nazis. These I personally consider some of the best music ever produced by mankind.
But I could be wrong.
I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of music. We have a friend who owns a CD / LP store and has spent his whole life collecting information about rock and roll. You seem to know a lot about classical music. This is not what I bring to the party and if I started talking about some esoteric album being the best in some obscure category I would likely be both full-of-shit and boring and just clogging up the net with more information-free bytes.
What we hope to do with the music section here is to talk about relatively accessible music and how it sounds here on various technologies of speakers and amplifiers and how different releases compare to each other on high quality audio reproduction systems.
So, we will increase our favorites to more than 5 over time (maybe we should change the name to ‘Reviews’? or ‘Music we play a lot because there is something both fun and yet deep about them that we have not yet fully understood – and they also sound pleasing to the ear and we think most visitors will like them too’?) but I do not think they will be any less scarey. 🙂
All the best,
Mike