Pursuing the Ultimate Music Experiences

Audio Federation High-Fidelity Audio Blog
 by Michael

HiEND Show, Vietnam, September 2009

[We will have a lot more about these shows here and in Spintricity].

After the success of Vietnam HiEnd show 2008 held in September, 2008 (please kindly visit this link to learn more: http://www.hiendshow.com/2008/) we have been preparing for the Vietnam HiEnd show 2009 from 25th to 27th September 2009 at Continental Saigon Hotel, 132 -134 Dong Khoi Street, 1st District, Hochiminh City, Vietnam.

VIETNAM HI-END SHOW 2009 – THE BEST CHANCE TO GET “GOLD OPPORTUNITY” FOR TRADEMARK PROMOTION, “GOOD OCCASION” FOR DIRECT TOUCHING VIETNAMESE POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS, “LARGE FLOOR” FOR SUPPLIERS, DISTRIBUTORS AND SALES

Therefore, we do hope for your and your trademark’s attention and participation at this show. With Vietnam HiEnd show 2009, your brand name will be promoted and you will have direct contact with Vietnamese consumers, widen and increase your presence in the Vietnamese market – a market with very large potential.

If you would like to find exclusive distributors or representatives, feel free to contact us. We will try our best to create an opportunity for you to meet with the Vietnamese leading electronic distributors during this show.

For further information of Vietnam HiEnd show 2009, please be kind to see attachments enclosed or directly contact Gold Mark JSC as follows:

Gold Mark JSC – ORGANIZER OF VIETNAM HI-END SHOW 2009
Address: 2nd Fl., S19, No.16 Rd, 3rd Ward, Binh Thanh Dist, HCMC, Vietnam

Contacted person: Do Nhu Quynh (Ms) – Director of Sales
Tel:+84 (0) 8. 3517 8045/44
Fax: 84.8.35174653
HP: 84.9.032.987.01
Email: nhuquynh@dauanvang.com
Website: www.dauanvang.com, www.hiendshow.com

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

Show Report, minus a few glitches, is more or less, just about…

done.

3700 photos [yep, still need to update the show issue cover. To think, the original expectation was 1500 photos] or so. 2201 pages.

Still needs some spelling fixes and a few pages got left behind during the mass publishing marathon that was this report.

Next issue will have a nice summary of the favorites – but the show report itself will serve as the archive and discussion point for a long time to come.

I hope.

Don’t want to be doing these things all that often… It takes on average 3 minutes to judge, clean up and crop each photo in photoshop.

A few changes to the toolbar, based on feedback from our readers.

One change is that we replaced the life-preserver with a question mark, as many people did not understand that the life-preserver was the thing to click for help. It was Neli’s favorite icon, and one of mine, so we hope people like the question mark… otherwise were going to bring back that life preserver all over again 🙂

It should also be easier to find older issues.

etc.

Enjoy!

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

Next: The Home Entertainment 2009 Photos

Once again, the page map and table of contents won’t show the new pages while we spend most of today [I hope I get done today] adding about 672 photos of THE Show at the Alexis Park. This is to speed the process both for us and for people looking at the 3100 older photos while we add all these pages.

Then we’ll be [more or less] done. Then I can get back to having a life. Ugh.

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

The Venetian Completion

Whew!

Not sure about doing THIS again anytime soon.

3100 photos so far. My poor clicker finger.

Hopefully the Alexis Park will be up in a few days as well. Then it is on to the next issue which will be normal sized. Normal being 100 – 200 pages.

Surprised no one has commented on my avatar being Gandalf the White. While he is still one of my favorite characters, I will probably replace him with my own photo sometime. Much as I hate looking at my own face [and I am sure you think likewise about my face as well :-)], I think it will promote a feeling of honesty and reduce that anonymous coward type posts we see on those other boards if at least a few people represent themselves as themselves.

And, besides, I look more like Gandalf the Gray – give me a few years – then it will all be white.

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

A few notes

I will be adding a lot of photos in the next day or so, and, for various reasons, I am not sometimes going to delay the update of each and every page so that it knows the last page number. What all this means is that you should go to the front page, and it will be up-to-date and it’s page map will have all of the new pages listed.

For those of you who have not noticed – the following browsers, in order of raw speed, are now about 10 times faster than Internet Explorer [the new dial-up]:

Google Chrome
Apple Safari
Firefox

Cruising with the Mouse Wheel really screams.

Hope people are enjoying being in on the beginning of a new high-end audio magazine. I certainly would have loved being part of HiFi+, or TAS, or whoever, in the early days. Able to put in my two cents about what they would do. But maybe that is just me.

Elsewhere – we are doing shootouts here periodically, but requested not to publish the results.

And contrary to the doom-and-gloom, Chicken Little, fear-mongering, ‘news’ ‘media’ – this February is almost a normal February for us.

And if we didn’t have this show encyclopedia, now looking to be 3500 photos, I might be able to get some sleep. 🙂

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

Internet Explorer 7 on Vista is 3 times SLOWER than Firefox

Do with this information what you will. This probably accounts for some disparity between those who are OK with the show report and those that are not.

BTW, IE 6 on my old XP laptop is pretty darn good – not as fast as Firefox, but close.

For those that do not know, Firefox is another browser, more or less a spin-off from the old Netscape. About 36% of the people who visit our websites use Firefox.

If you want to try Firefox, and it will not interfere with IE, search for Firefox download and proceed from there to install it on your computer – my daughter did it a few months ago and she said it was easy and she is usually computer shy [go figure].

For you others, IE 8 will be out shortly and I am sure Microsoft will be annoying you to upgrade. I think IE 8 will be as fast as Firefox with respect to reading the magazine [based on the yet even faster Google ‘Chrome” browser we are also starting to work with. Of course, Firefox 3.1 will be out soon too, which will raise the bar yet again :-)].

In the mean tine, we will try and put SOME speed ups in the magazine just for IE [which will delay the release of the page-turning speed upgrade for everyone]. But Like I said below, it is like Vista – big and slow – and in this case they do not seem all that interested in improving it [but at least they are more interested in it now than they have been over the last 5 years].

OK. Now back to our scheduled program of high-end audio. 🙂

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

As I go through each room in the CES 2009 Show Toy Box…

… I am reminded of how diverse – and at the same time how similar – all this equipment is.

As I mentioned below, we are now at over 2200 photos. That is 25% larger than our largest report – which was last CES at about 1750 photos. I expect it to be about 3000 photos when all is said and done.

This is not so much a traditional ‘Show Report’ – which we helped redefine from being a couple of pages in Stereophile that came out each Spring to something much more comprehensive – but a Show ‘Toy Store’.

Who was there and what cool equipment did they bring? Did people like what they heard? Is it new? What are the specs? Where can I find out more?

We are talking with many exhibitors to try and get them to include information right in the show report itself [and they are of course welcome to contact us – there are 1600 on our list and we will not get to them all in a decent amount of time] . We include little guys and big massive corporations – speakers and cables and tweaks. The stats show that people visit show reports over and over, even those that are years old.

We also want other people who were at the show to comment on the rooms that they went to and heard. We are talking with a few people whose ears and honesty we trust – and hopefully they will be able to actually get around to posting things.

And you too. Don’t be shy people. Just click on the little comment icon and post away. Otherwise people will just have to rely on just me and my ears – and I am very very very picky, focusing on the uber high-end as we do, so that very little sounds great [but a dozen or so systems did sound good].

I think one thing that people do not understand – being so use to the current batch of audio websites not changing year after year – is that we change things all the time, adding features, removing others, and improving the experience day after day after day. We are much more like Amazon – where new things appear and disappear all the time [and Audio Federation, though it is so big and spread out no one knows all the stuff that we do] – and not at all like the other take-it-or-leave-it sites.

And this is only the beginning.

All that this means is that it is all about the Toys. Looking at, Learning About, Talking About the Toys [when we are not happily listening to them].

We are talking with many people, famous and unknown, about writing what they REALLY think about audio in a magazine that welcomes diversity. Should we be talking to YOU?

We already have improvements that will be released soon that will speed up page turning so that this Show Report will be about as fast as scrolling through photos in the old show report. We have plans for indexing all the photos so you can find all the photos with Nordost cables in them, or Manley equipment, or tube amps, or… We have plans for tag clouds so you can instantly see which rooms are the most talked about, or which manufacturers, or which subjects dejour.

Bu what else? If any of you have ideas about how we can kick things ‘up a notch’, please post it here or send us an email.

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

Continuing upgrades of Spintricity

In the pursuit of optimizing the experience for both you the magazine reader and us, the wacko audiophiles – uh – wacko gigantico magazine show reporters – uh – whoever – we try our best to make both reading and producing multi-thousand page show reports as easy and as fun as possible.

To that end…

We added a Quick! Post a Comment! feature right on each page [in the upper right: that allows you, and us, to quickly post a comment about whatever it is we want to say about a page. As you may have noticed, the avatar [a little picture that represents the inner you – that you can upload after you register, or you can use the default Groucho Marx lookalike.] appears on the right side of the page. Click on one of these guys and you will see their comments.

Of course, their comments are also in the Forum, where War and Peace-like comments can be read in their entirety.

For now, we changed things so that even you unregistered lurker types can post comments – without having to register first – just like in this blog. But, unlike this blog, posters won’t have to indicate that they are human [i.e. not a spam-spewing robot] because robots won’t be an issue until we are very, very successful.

I like these kind of popup comments, because, from my point of view, often times adding permanent text on a show report page kind of clutters up the view of the equipment. We intend on going back to a more traditional magazine look [but with modern weblike features] for the regular articles in regular issues in regular months.

And then maybe we can go back to not being so wacko.

Or not. 🙂

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

Al Stiefel Leaves Us

Al, perhaps best known, along with his wife Marjorie, as the organizer and co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, as well being co-partner of Red Rock Audio, left us all to go to that perhaps bigger and hopefully less stressful high-end audio show in the sky.

Al was our friend [who we loved], a supporter of Audio Federation, a supporter of local high-end audio manufacturers, dealers, and audiophiles both here in Colorado, nationally, and world-wide.

A lot of people support these things in spirit, but few [none] throw so much [all] of their energy and time and sweat into it.

There is really no one else [coming even close to] doing what Al did for all of us audiophiles. Just the way he actually cared for and about the success of each and every exhibitor – both at the show and the whole year ’round – is uniquely ‘Al’.

He will be missed and missed and missed…

[RMAF 2009 will, like always, be next October, with organization by Marjorie, and support by Joe Reynolds (Nordost), Ray Kimber and Roy Gregory (HiFi+)]

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

CES 2009 report has already exceeded 1500 photos…

… so I guess my previous estimates of the entire report having 1500 photos were…. low.

I think the source of my failure to guestimate correctly lies in the fact that with a better camera – more of the photos came out lookin’ good.

Also the new format makes show casing each room, as well as we possibly can, more useful, as we will be able to find the room again someday [and the search engines will be able to find them too]. We will actually try to go back through the show report, and tag each piece of equipment for what it is – so that the show report will become sort of the be-all-and-end-all of current high-end audio equipment information. Yes, we are hoping exhibitors will post more information in the comments section as well, along with comments by other people who were there, and questions by those who weren’t [or, knowing the net as we all do, visa-versa].

Remember for posts in the forums: Politeness is Correct – you can say more or less what you want, but be polite about it.

Yes, I know the show report is still only about 40% done [here I go guestimating again] and everybody is kind of holding their breath to see just what can [will] happen. We do think that maybe putting T.H.E. Show’s show report into the next issue – along with a backlog of articles that are piling up.

in CES 2009 / High-end Audio HiFi and Stereo / Show Reports 0 comments