March 2011

In This Issue....
New Changes Make Finding Reviews Easier
Article By Steven R. Rochlin

  While i could tout the many new reviews and World Premieres in this issue, i would first like to honor a recently passed away reviewer of ours; then the recent site changes. In mid-February I received and e-mail from a close friend of audiophile reviewer Wayne Zufall that he had passed away. While I knew he has been going through some medical conditions, it seemed he was doing well with the major surgery items and only a minor item or two were remaining. Some of you may have met him during the 2010 RMAF event last October. In mid-November he was admitted to the hospital, had many tests done and was being treated and seemed to be improving. He still had some issues to deal with and it looked like surgery was going to be needed in the near future. In the end, everyone expected he was going to make a full recovery. Sadly, he passed away about two weeks as of this writing and we wish Wayne Zufall's family and friends all the very best. You can read his articles by clicking here .

Changes
During a much needed two week vacation by Yours Truly, it was time for me to analyze things and focus on how to improve this website. Sure the website's pages could look prettier, yet would that really change the information you are seeking? During the boom times leading up to the banking crash we all prospered. As such Enjoy the Music.com hired many new writers and was able to launch a DIY Audio section. Frankly, I love DIY yet knew this type of endeavor would be a money loser. As times were good and Enjoy the Music.com does pay their writers, the DIY Audio review section was helped by the growing Consumer Electronics interest and financial good times. Now that we are all dealing with the banking mess, some things have indeed slowed down. Still, stubborn me refuses to stop the DIY Audio magazine for the simple fact that in my opinion DIY is a cool way to make your own gear, tweak what you may already have, and learn about what makes your speakers, tube amplifier, etc. operate.

We also had launched a Superior Audio section to generally separate items below a certain price point within their genre. This section of Enjoy the Music.com was for those seeking the very best. This is not to say that inexpensive gear can no be truly excellent. It is to say that audiophiles with a $20,000 budget for speakers or an amplifier may want to have a single section that highlights such items instead of sifting through the myriad of sub-$5000 items. Well, now that the economy has changed and perhaps I have played the ‘divide and conquer' too much, have decided to bring everything into the longstanding Review Magazine section of Enjoy the Music.com. While there are sub-sections within the table of contents and each section does have its own archives, all equipment reviews, manufacturer article, music reviews, think pieces, etc can now be found inside the Review Magazine. This benefits all readers in that one magazine now stores all new reviews. So as a result of this change, a single web page will have all new reviews, think pieces, etc neatly itemized out for you to read each month. There is now no need to hunt down on each of the three sections as you needed to do before this change.

An added benefit to our readers due to this recent change is that perhaps those who may be DIY'ers might enjoy reading what is a truly cost-no-object piece of equipment, or perhaps if you are seeking a $2,000 DAC you might find a DIY DAC of interest. No matter what your preference, everything can now be found on a single page so each moth you only need to visit one web page to get all of our new reviews and articles.

Sure it was difficult to make the changeover to many hundreds of pages and it took me many days, with an old-school 40+ hour no sleep all-sugar and many espressos code-fest by Yours Truly, to get it done. In some weird way, I actually enjoyed getting back to my roots of zero sleep code-fests, as it reminded me of what it took years ago to make this site what it is today… over 5000 web pages and nearly 800MB of server space! Years ago I started an opt-in Mailing List to keep readers informed of site changes, contests, etc and no matter how many offers have come my way, my promise of never renting, loaning or selling it is still true to this day. If you are not a member of the Enjoy the Music.com Mailing List you can join it by clicking here. So have always adhered to my promises yet there are also times to get back to one's roots too. If you have any site suggestions or questions you can always e-mail them to me.

And so with that said my hopes, as always, is that you truly do...

Enjoy the Music (apologies for the audio quality of the video below, yet if you have Yes 90125 it is a great album),

Steven R. Rochlin