Well, Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft’s latest version of its browser, which many people still use, has come and… well, if you are like us, you had no choice but to upgrade from 7. They kind of folded it in with a security update.

We had high hopes for version 8. Kind of put off putting a lot of work into things until this release came out. But instead, 8 is lagging further and further behind the competition in terms of raw speed.

So, tell… ya… what… we’re… going… to… do.

We’ve rewritten a large part of Spintricity (actually magazines.me) and Internet Explorer (i.e. IE), in the ‘lab’, now works on Spintricity about 10 times faster than it used to. About as fast as FireFox used to. Maybe faster.

Of course, FireFox is now about 3 times faster, and Google Chrome, well, I think we’ve achieved warp speed captain.

This should be up on the website next week sometime, we are hoping.

There is a new issue of Spintricity, with several articles already.

I think people will find the breadth and depth of our magazine a little different than the other mags out there.

We have an article on comparing photographic lenses to personal taste in shopping for music.

We have a review of some new music, Fever Ray, the day after it was released and of Pandora, the most popular internet radio site.

We also have a small report on the Hiend Show last fall in Vietnam.

We are always looking for more photos of more shows. Anybody want to photograph Montreal? Munich and Milan if we don’t make it [we probably won’t]?

We are also always look for more writers who want to write about something they are passionate about. You don’t have to know who to spell, or to be an expert at anything - it is passion that we all are wanting to share with other people in this cold cruel often-boring world.

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!

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.

… 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 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 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!

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 ]