There's a particular kind of joy that only happens at a high-end audio show. You walk into a room full of strangers and within five minutes realize you're surrounded by family.
Terri, James, and I just got home from the Vienna High End audio show, and the trip is still settling in.
Here's a quick video link to see our booth: http://youtu.be/GGzkjgmhBGQ
And here's a cool interview I had with one of the brightest amplifier designers today and how we've been chosen to be first to launch this new beauty: http://youtu.be/4sSWi8GHlEs
And here's a final interview I had fun with of two of AKM's best engineers announcing the world's lowest distortion op-amp that PS Audio has the privilege of being first to market with: http://youtu.be/vKYTm23FXBs
The rooms were extraordinary. The gear on display ranged from the genuinely innovative to the strangest I have ever seen. We listened. We talked. We heard things that surprised us. But the lasting impression of the trip wasn't any single demo or any single product. It was the people.
The HiFi Family members who showed up in Vienna had traveled from everywhere — Korea, Germany, Brazil, Australia, India, the US, the UK, half a dozen other countries. We met readers of this blog, viewers of the channel, longtime customers, brand-new customers, and a remarkable number of fellow obsessives whose connection to all of this had nothing to do with PS Audio at all.
There's something genuinely moving about that. We tend to think of our hobby as a small thing, a private obsession, a slightly eccentric corner of life that mostly gets noticed by family members making jokes about how much we spend on cables. Then you walk into a hall in Vienna and find a few thousand people who get it without a word of explanation. They share the same standards. They make the same trade-offs. They love the same kind of recording for the same reasons.
Terri, who tolerates a lot of audio talk and indulges almost all of it, said something on the flight home that stuck with me. She said the people we met in Vienna reminded her that the gear is just a way of finding each other.
The music is the reason.
The community is the reward.
A worldwide family. Now that was worth the trip.
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