by Michael

Progress on CES Show Report

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.

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

Stereophile post on our room at T.H.E. Show, CES 2009

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:

Ongaku Means Ecstasy

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!

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

We're back…. from CES 2009, now for some photos

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.

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