by Michael

CES and T.H.E. Show 2009 Press Releases and Daily Photos

As some of you have seen, we have put out one of two special issues we are doing for CES 2009 and T.H.E. Show.

The first one, CES 2009 Preview and Dailies is already up and we have more than a dozen press releases up so far [not bad for a 2-week old publication – and we’ll do a lot better once all the bugs are obliterated out of the software… where is my bazooka?].

We will publish photos each day, if things go as planned, as large as we can make them.

Sponsors, Advertisements and Press Releases and Juicy Photos are welcome.

A few hints for using the magazine… resize the window to the size you want the page to be [sounds obvious, but some people are so used to scrolling around in little itty bitty windows :-)] .

Click on the ‘Page x’ of ‘Page x of 28’ in the top bar and you get a handy-dandy page navigator that helps you figure out where in the heck you are and where in the heck you want to be…

OK, time to start packing? Maybe so…

in CES 2009 / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Spintricity 0 comments
 by Michael

Funny about forums…

Spintricity is two weeks old.

I posted about the new magazine on several forums.

Asylum deleted it in about 5 minutes [why would anybody there be interested in a magazine on audio I do not know – and it is not like 6moons, American Wired and Positive Feedback built their magazine circulations up by posting there].

It is now, for $20, in their News forum. Not a bad price – but a TOTALLY different audience compared to the general forum.

Posted it on AudioReview’s News forum. Deleted in two days after 9 people read the post. Oooookay.

Posted it on EchoLoft’s main forum [Singapore] and Audio Circle’s News forum. Both were still there last I looked with no responses but a 100s of people have looked at the post.

Posted it on Canuck Audio Market [Canada] and I get a couple of nice and a couple of obnoxious posts before it devolves into a lots of people complimenting some guy on his soft porn avatar.

I haven’t even tried posting something like this on Audiogon for several years. In the past it has not gone very well.

———————–

So, one thing we would like to avoid at Spintricity is deleting posts about audio so that people can get on with the business of doing serious chatting. At a higher level this means that people promoting their products – when they are AUDIO products – makes a lot of sense on a audio forum. How else are they going to let people know about their product? These forums are the people who are supposed to be interested in products like this.

Sure, we could charge for the ability to post promotions … does Audio Circle charge the manufacture’s for their manufacturer forum? You know, the ModWright, etc forums. But that seems… not right.

We would rather charge for people running ads that encourage ever more people to buy their equipment, not for the ability/net real-estate to talk to [possibly prospective] owners of their equipment and fans.

Does this make sense?

[I certainly don’t know. That’s why I am asking :-)]

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

Forums

Spintricity has forums and I have been wondering about how to keep it from being a place I hate.

About 90% of all people we talk to actively hate the forums – by which they mean people running them and/or the people on them.

Which, if this is true in general, means that forums as such are really not very successful.

I have certainly imagined a forum that I would like to be able to visit – where people are nice, passionate about audio, think about things and share their thoughts freely…

*sigh*

People seem to like Facebook and MySpace. Young people I mean.

Perhaps forums should be organized around groups of self-selected people, like those two communities are. So the forum would actually consist of lots of tiny little forums …and no jerks would be allowed to stay long in your forum unless you wanted them to [because there is the possibility that we are all jerks at some level or another ;-)].

So we could, for an example, have a Jorma Prime Cable forum, where we could all talk about this cable, post new topics [threads] and discuss our experiences about this cable.

Or it could be more general, like The $4K A Meter And Above Cable forum.

I think this would be better than just, say, Cables [does anybody even have a cable forum, anywhere? Or am I forgetting…]. Or the Exotic SET Tube Amps forum instead of … the Amps forum like a few forums have.

You would probably want to participate in many… dozens… of forums… but you would NOT have to participate in the $100 and below cable blow-out forum unless you wanted to [or ones where there are so-called audiophiles who cannot hear the difference between cables]. Or between power cords [I know, I know, it is harder to hear differences in cables on some equipment that has a very strong sound of its own.. ].

So…

Here is your chance…

If you want a nice forum you can go to and chat as your amps warm up for the evening after the power has been out all day — a place you can find out ways to improve YOUR system, and not just read a could of bored guys chatting about nothing to each other adinfinitum… then speak up about what YOU would want at a place like this.

Because we can do just about anything… limited only by our imagination [which, although a significant limitation, is less so than the average human’s lemming tendencies to repeat the same mistake everyone else has made… vis-a-vis forums in this case]

in High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Philosophy / Spintricity 0 comments