September 2014

In This Issue....
Best Of 2014 Blue Note Awards
We celebrate our annual Blue Note Awards, provide industry leading coverage of the California Audio Show plus our new Internet servers.
Article By Steven R. Rochlin

  The past month has been extremely busy with new Web server, my extensive and industry leading coverage of the California Audio Show plus we celebrate Enjoy the Music.com's 2014 Blue Note Awards. During the past month or so we have been busy updating our entire infrastructure to handle the massive amount of bandwidth we are serving up to you, our loyal readers. When you add in all the high resolution video and live streaming, we are now delivering many times more bandwidth overall within a few months than we usual do during an entire year!

Some of you may have noticed our site experienced occasional anomalies over the past month and we apologize for this temporary situation. As any IT person knows, completely changing over to a new infrastructure is a mixed bag of joy and pain. You love all the new abilities and speed with state-of-the-art gear. On the other hand, no matter how high the quality of gear and stable the OS / backbone, things invariably can go awry. As you read this our new servers are up and running at near optimum levels and i'd say more, yet we all know to be very careful what one says as soon afterwards... And thus there are a few things within the background that need some tidying up and we'll be getting that done during the next week or so.

California Audio Show
i'd like to thank Constantine Soo and all the wonderful music lovers who exhibited / attended the California Audio Show in San Francisco a few weekends ago. Enjoy the Music.com's California Audio Show 2014 coverage spans over 45 pages filled with more than 210 photos(!) in total. Due to our extensive library of equipment reviews, i felt that it was time we also add associated equipment review links too. Since we have reviewed many thousands of pieces of high fidelity audio gear over the past 19 years, it made sense to make it easier for you to read our assessment of all the great gear too. This way when you see a great piece of gear within our show report, you can easily click the review link and enjoy 'til your heart's content. As any 'professional' reviewer will tell you, trying to review and comment on gear during a show is perhaps not the best way to truly judge a piece of gear. Horrible electrical power delivery shared by hundreds of other pieces of gear, equipment that has been placed in less than acoustically optimized rooms and the like are only a few of the many problems. This is why any seasoned reviewer knows that the only true way to review a piece of gear in within a proper, and controlled, setup. Yes, we can visit a room and provide some overall impression, yet in the end the wise readers knows that anything from bad electricity to unforeseen mismatched gear can happen. There are times equipment manufacturers will share a room, yet they might not be 100% sure said gear will play well together. Of course there are dealer rooms, where a local dealer knows a system and sets up said systems accordingly.

Another factor is that the gear at shows can sound better during each passing day. As the gear settles in from the brutal hands of shipping, plus perhaps some tweaking along the way, rooms do indeed generally sound their best on the very last day of an event. Of course there are some problems that one can not simply tweak away. One of them is placing big speakers within an inappropriate small room (i'm look at you Sound Labs). This happen more often than we all care to admit. The opposite can happen too, as small stand-mounted speakers can get 'swallowed up' within a large room and then some reviewer type says there is no deep bass energizing the room. Well duh! One would not take their 120 foot yacht out on a very small lake just as you would not take a 10-foot Sun Dolphin Pro fishing boat out into the open ocean. You do not try and land a 747 at a local, short landing strip airport either. A tiny bit of common sense can go a long way.

Enjoy the Music.com's 2014 Blue Note Awards
As many of you now, we are extremely stingy with giving out awards and accolades. In this day and age where everyone is a winner and just participating within a sport gets you some acclaimed recognition, we are more old school. If a product receives our award, you know it has great merit and well worth looking in to. My marketing friends tell me to give out more awards, including during shows, as it will sell more ad space and said quotes may invariably appear within their ads, their Web site, and social media. Frankly, we have limited ad space on this site and in fact are sold out in many positions! So we must be doing something right to sell out of certain spots many months in advance. To me, what really matters is that our avid readership has been strong and is growing at a fantastic rate! Add to that, our readers know that an award is so rare that when you see it, well then, you know it is hard fought for and earned. As they say, the cream rises to the top. You can see Enjoy the Music.com's 2014 Blue Note Award at this link. Of course in the end what really matters is that you...

Enjoy the Music,

Steven R. Rochlin