In order to make a more perfect magazine…
We continually modify things to add features, move them around, as we get feedback from users from all over the world.
To see how everything works, remember you can always click on the life preserver in the upper right hand corner.
Which will put up the tips and da tricks:
Enjoy!
Estimated completion date is still well within 2009… 🙂
First some background.
There are over 5300, 75GB of photos.
On Thursday evening during the show it became apparent that my laptop’s disk disk not have enough room for the photos that were coming in each evening.
So I started archiving them on to DVD and deleting them off the disk to make more room.
It later, Saturday night, it became apparent that I did not have enough DVDs [only brought 10] to archive all the photos. So Neli dashed me to Frys – took me about 20 minutes to get there and back I think with her driving like a crazy woman 🙂 and picked up a FreeAgent 500GB hard disk.
Ahhhh, disk space. 🙂
Antoher thing that happened Thursday evening is that I found I only had Photoshop Elements 3 on the laptop. 3 doesn’t open Canon RAW files, which for this camera, the 5D, really makes a difference [RAW files look a lot clearer]. So Thursday night at the Alexis Park, I bought and downloaded Photoshop Elements 7 from Adobe.
At over 500MB.
I did a double take, and tried it again. A triple take. Still over 500MB.
So I set that download off and went to bed. Hopefully it didn’t slow down the Alexis Park network down too much. It was pretty late.
I got to use Elements 7 for the 2nd and 3rd day of the dailies. And, since copying all those photos on to 25 DVDs would be a royal pain, Neli’s idea – which I am using – is just to archive them onto the little wallet-sized 500GB disk itself. The cost is a little more, $100 versus $15.
So here we are now. Today.
Almost done with the photos first wing of floor 29.
When all is said and done, it will take 100 hours to Photoshop the 5300 photos, ending up with maybe 2000, and about a week to post them and add comments on about 1000 or so pages on Spintricity.
So, now you see why, even though I would like to add comments on every page, that would be the same as writing a small novel in 3 weeks [along with all the photo processing].
However, because this show report is more of an archival document than past reports, which are more so than other reports out there, we can continually add content to the room – and you will likely see other people-with-ears post their comments next to mine on some of these rooms as well.
OK.
Hope to have the pages for the 1st Wing of the 29th up sometime late tomorrow.
Wes Phillips had some very nice things to say about our Audio Note U.K. room [with Nordost ODIN and Acrolink powercords, HRS M3 isolation bases and Nimbus Couplers] at:
We thank Wes and J.A. for visiting our room and posting their impressions and are, of course, pleased, especially Neli [! :-)] who staffed the room by herself for the entire show.
Have to say, this being the first time I recollect seeing these two in action, they really seem to enjoy being audiophiles and playing music. Not all [aka few] show reporters are like this, many coming off as if it is all a lot of hard work [which it is].
[Not sure how I come off . To Constantine Soo (Dagogo), I think I come off as someone who gets in the way of his trying to listen a lot ;-)))]
Funny thing [or not] while Neli was trying, and trying, and trying some more to find a CD in the folder, I mentioned something like maybe putting CDs at random in the folder wasn’t such a good idea [actually, what I said was probably a lot less coherent], expecting good ole wifey to come back with a witty, if not outright scathing, rejoinder and lighten up the situation a little bit. You know, at least something like ‘ASShole’ with that big smile of hers [no, she doesn’t always smile when she says this :-)]. But noooooo. So I now wonder if this playfully antagonistic dialog technique between Neli and I is such a good method to lighten up somewhat awkward situations after all. 😉
And yes, we are still preoccupied with all the optimizations that we did not get time to implement with this particular system . Some other time we’ll write about how we tried [and failed, but we got more ideas] to maintain the coherence and lack of strain and harshness, while at the same time opening up the sound-stage and increasing the separation to suit Florian [who has agreed to write for the magazine] – and of course this was Sunday night… AFTER the show when we didn’t have to worry about ‘getting back to what sounded pretty good before’ if we really messed things up].
Anyway, everybody should congratulate Neli. Congratulations Neli!
Took more than 5300 photos.
Now to process them and get them up on the site.
Here are some photos of some new products from the lines that we love:
The HRS SXR now comes in silver
This is a good deal easier to photograph than the black SXR. I am in favor. 🙂 [In fact, it looks surprisingly good – this from someone who usually prefers black].
The new Audio Aero LaSource. A prototype so what you see here does not have the quality finish that the final product will have. [The player with the black finish was featured in our Show Report Dailies.
Harmonic Resolutions Systems MXR equipment rack in … mahogany. Aesthetix electronics.
A few preview shots on Neli’s camera.
Coltrane Soprano. $45,000.00.
Jorma Design Origo [Jorma Design Prime without the bybees]
More photos up on Spintricity. Even though it started off cold cold cold here – it was 54 degrees at 7pm last night – do things are looking up.
Not much happening here in way of people setting up. But today is the day….
We’re leaving for CES in a few hours…
When thinking about how best to cover this particular show, and not *appear* to be so mean about it [Who knew people really do like adverbs in their reviews. So now we know. And I was never mean – just factual – but that means so very little to people who Do Not Want To Hear It (and the rest who use their minds to hear what they think they should be hearing based on their limited, spotty, sparse, farcical and unbalanced knowledge of the technology being used. And I’m ignoring those to whom things sound best when $$$ advertising budgets and fine scotch malt whiskey are in play. Yes, let’s ignore them as much as possible.) OK. Got it out of my system. Ahhhh…. feel better now. Thanks.],
so, uh, I think about requesting if exhibitors could…
… give me a very short quote to put up on their room photos. You know like “our quadruple bypass triode architecture allows us to achieve hallucinogenic effects in 90% of our listeners in under 2.2 seconds” [who cares about the price, I want one of *these* :-)]
… put their room number on their literature so I can match them up later after visiting 200 rooms [with a lot of walking in between – this is really a marathon but in slooooow-mo] in 4 days
… let me know what they want featured most of all
Because each room gets it own ‘article’ in the show report. That is, between 1 and, say 20 pages of full-impact-page photos. With large text that will highlight the main features of the system – and small text that describes the experience and overall system flavor.
And we have [multiple] technologies that will now both make the text readable but not obscure the photos in any meaningful way.
Anybody else have any ideas?
How abut you Exhibitors?
And you Audiophiles?
Lurkers? Naw, you just like to lurk. That’s fine but these other folks….
High-grade Home Audio Porn addicts? I know you are out there, and I, of course, have been public with my addiction for lo these many years….
Enjoy!
-Mike
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…
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 :-)]
