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!

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.

… 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.

… 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.

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:

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!

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.

CES 2009 Day 1

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….