by Michael

Free Ads on Spintricity?

One of the things I like doing the most is helping promote the hobby. I especially enjoy helping smaller manufacturers – in particular those that make less expensive but good sounding equipment for the money – get attention from the audiophile community [one of my favorite things about the show reports].

We have been offering people the opportunity to publish their press releases, for free, for the last few weeks – but press releases are hard to come up with, especially if you, like me, cannot tell the difference between press releases and advertising. Many people do not want to offend us sending us a advertisement when we asked for press releases only.

So we are going to fix that.

And, as we all know, the economy sucks [unless you are a bank, insurance company, or wall-street firm – or lobbyist or news channel for the same].

Now that the magazine is [almost :-)] usable we could go out and pound the pavement signing up advertisers just like all those other rags. But then we would just get the same ole same ole advertisers who can afford to pay for advertising and the other 98% of the industry would be left out of the party.

Well, that kind of small potatoes party is just not what Spintricity, who brings you 3000+ photo / 2200 page show reports, had in mind. We want 1000s of of brands to be able to present their products, services and story. Well, we want a lot anyway.

To that end, dear reader, we are trying to get everybody in our high-end audio wonderland to pony up one FULL-PAGE ad, which we will publish for free in each issue of Spintricity.

In this way we want to turn each issue of Spintricity into a show report-like cornucopia, a bonanza, a sh*t load if you will, of equipment, and information and photos about equipment – in addition to articles on the lives, times, and adventures in audiophiledom.

For those companies that can afford to do more, we will offer the ability to purchase additional pages, to purchase attention getters for their ads, and to purchase special ‘live webpage’ ads.

To assist with ads, you manufacturers who cannot afford to hire a graphics design firm, and don’t want to go completely bald [yes, you women too] trying to learn photoshop, you can select a photo from one of our show reports [or send us one of yours], send us some (small amount please!) text and we will make an ad for you.

This will be the policy for Spintricity for the forseeable future, and forever if things work out as we expect.

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One last thing. A show report is coming right up. You know it. We know it. [Oh boy do we know it].

OK, yes, that would be RMAF 2009 [that is Rocky Mountain Audio Fest you search engine, you].

We create a separate, linkable article for each room at the show. In the article is several pages of photos. In amongst those photos we will run industry ads, for free, for products in that room. This will allow visitors to show report pages for the room to see tech spec sheets, ads, backgrounders, other products from the same brand, whatever.

This allows you, the reader, to see lots more (accurate and appealing) information about the equipment displayed in the room.

We will run 1 fullpage ad/spec sheet/whatever for each brand listed on the sign of the room. Exhibitors can purchase additional pages.

For those who can’t exhibit at the show – we will run your ad in the show report as per a normal issue. Not sure where we will put these if your equipment is not on display, but we’ll figure something out.

[I know I am talking to two different audiences in this post, the industry and audiophiles – and I am switching back and forth faster than a switching power supply – but, well, sorry about that].

Many in the industry read this blog – and we will be sending out emails to the others. But who reads emails [about 20%]? So you audiophiles need to coerce your favorite manufacturers to come up with an ad to publish in Spintricity. Remember: FULL-PAGE [any format] and lots of juicy take-no-prisoners graphics.

Enjoy!

Email ad submissions to: industry@spintricity.com

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / News / RMAF 2009 / Show Reports / Spintricity 0 comments
 by Michael

Smoke from the L.A. fires

Can hardly see the city today, or even more than a few 100 yards, because of all the smoke.

You can see from the satellite map how the smoke from the fires is blowing here [Boulder, Colorado] from California

It seemed like such a long distance. But it apparently is not. You can even smell the smoke. We are located at the right tip of the smoke stream.

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / News 0 comments
 by Michael

Audiophile Survey

[A post on the linkedIn board was by a student who is performing a survey – you might find it interesting]

Survey for my academic research on audiophile market – please share your opinion by replying the questions.

Hello,
I am an audiophile and an MBA student who is writing his dissertation project on the audiophile equipment market. It is a non-commercial academic research project (not sponsored by any company) aimed to analyse the market and its main trends, and to convey the views of the real customers to the companies in the market.
Here I ask all fellow audiophiles to spend some of their time to fill out my survey. Here is the link:

LINK

It is hopefully going to be helpful not only to the companies but to all people in our hobby. This market is under-researched, and companies at times may become quite delusional about the target customers, their views and needs. Please ask your audiophile friends to complete this survey too.
I decided to offer a prize of 100 pounds or $200, paid via PayPal, to stimulate the participants (provided they give some means of communicating with them in the survey). I will randomly determine the winner on 20th Sept. 2009. The personal info will remain private and will not be used anywhere again.

[After some criticisms – aren’t audiophiles the friendliest people? – he posted further comments about his survey]

Thank you for your comments, and especially for filling in the lengthy survey, which I must admit may be a bit confusing.
I am not a professional researcher, in fact this is my first ‘research’ in the last 12 years, and even back then it was based on experimental observations rather than surveys. I accept all criticisms, some questions may be biased somehow towards the research focus.
Also, Sony and Phillips were picked just as examples of mass market companies in this project, which is not commercial and not sponsored by any company. However, I am interested to find out why the big companies that were present in this market before (for example Sony ES or Pioneer Elite series) and were making equipment that was often competitive (and would stay in Stereophile Recommended Components for years), abandoned this market. I am wondering if this decision actually contributed to eroding differentiation in their mass market product lines, which in turn contributed to the increasing commoditization of consumer electronics market. Some companies even abandoned the traditional mass market in favour of less commoditized market segments with lower competitive pressure (Kenwood moving to marine and car media products, for example).
I can’t help but wonder, given their R&D abilities, powerful supply chains and enormous production facilities, why wouldn’t they (big companies) come up with something like (just as example) the battery-powered amps Red Wine Audio is selling at $3k, making it 6-channel and priced under $1k. I am not suggesting that they come and kill all speicialized companies (which will never happen), but for goodness sake, the whole market exists because the big guys are making really bad sounding equipment. So probably they are lacking some critical competences to be competitive in this respect, the reason hiding in the organizational culture, anti-economies of scale, their strategy formulation, etc.
As for the higher end of high end. The majority of components sold in the market are in the medium range of $1800-5000 per component, and bringing into the survey ultra high-end (like Avantgarde Acoustic, MBL, etc.) selling in very limited quantities, would only unnecessarily lengthen the survey, as they do not statistically represent the market. Turntables and iPods… I wonder just how representative are those… As for the iPod, I know a good deal of audiophiles in a number of countries, and dare I say, only three of them own the device, and would not even connect it to their main systems. I have multiterabyte media archives, and space is still always short – why would I even connect a 8 to 32Gb device to my system? It is inferior in every respect to a good music server, be it a custom built computer, or a good hdd/network media device. I can’t imagine a good reason to even want an iPod unless I walk a lot or ride a bus regularly. Some of the audiophiles I know own turntables (not a big fraction though), but the major part of their music collection are CDs. I know only very few die-hard vinyl fans, who would not listen to a good digital source. Of course, I understand that personal experience is not a sound base for scientific judgement, but it can at least provide some hints.
In this survey for obvious reasons I have to use non-probability sampling, which is not a good thing research-wise. If I offset it even further by including variables which are not very representative of the population, stretching the distribution extremes – nothing meaningful will come out.

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / News 0 comments