Oooh, hifi events, takes me back, baaack, baaaaaaack!
I did 'Live! 2000' at Earls Court, so very very noisy, it wasnt possible to 'hear' anything, even in the test rooms due to the noise from other stands.
The state of the art high end LCD screens sucked, Plasmas ruled and surraaaaand saaaaaand was the thing with big monster subwoofers and HD (720p/ 1080i) was being shown off by some of the big guys - there were still flat screen CRTs too, offering component inputs which - at the time- was just about the best way to show high quality images in the home.
Hifi was going through the doldrums and Home Cinema kicked it up the ass. Many pre-amp/processors (but rarely receivers) had a handy quirk of sounding excellent in stereo so for the purist who didnt mind a shit load of extra buttons and modes it was a win-win plus an excuse to have more speakers!
An extra bonus was that DVDs had a bit of extra frequency range for the audio channels over CD so music mixed correctly, new or old, would sound amazing in 5.1 on a decent system. DVD Audio then became a short lived thing but streaming has just about killed most* hardware formats and I never got into SACD and the likes, the music I listened too was never released that way
I still love films that are done 'right' and have had a 5 channel system since about 1990 when I bought my first Kenwood stack system with surraaaaaaaaand saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand! - Too many A's? Anyway, if I really like a film I'll still buy it on 4k Blue-ray and I'll buy the CDs too if my favourite popular pop beat combo release a new tune
*...and then theres vinyl, it just wont go away and seems to have evolved into a freakish collectors hyperbubble
Anyway! I ramble, we had listening evenings and A/B blind tests and such like, sometimes with a Formula1 guest which were a lot of fun. We even had a BBC sound engineer (he so nearly got me a job at Fujitsu!) but he was obsessed with Bryston anyway which was overpriced in my opinion. - and theres me being a fanboy of Krell and Mark Levinson at the time
Other highlights was the 90 inch Fujistu that was the biggest plasma in the UK at the time but picked up just about every bit of interference imaginable which spoilt the Playstation nights...
I fix cars now....,
pffffftttt
