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