The *NOT BORING!* Hi-Fi faff chat and sales

Ikemi is the big item there - maybe £1,000 if you're lucky....many are advertised above that (mainly serviced ones) but mine was £800 not that long ago and most seem to sell for the 850-950 mark.
£200 ish for the Majik
Maybe £180 for the Katans
....so your £1500 total probably isn't too far out if all in perfect order although original boxes will help.
 
How do these shows work - is it just loads of competing noise from different exhibitors?
this venue had plenty space between them. So unlike the hotels that these events normally take place in. it was good volume in each room. Good in show discounts too of 20% off.
 
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
 
Are tone controls a bad thing? i've always been told that a 'true' audiophile never uses them. Perhaps as i'm getting older. I find them helpful!!!! I found this https://www.learnabout-electronics.org/Amplifiers/amplifiers42.php but it's a bit techie for me. So are they a bad thing?? And should i been 'hanged' for using them :eek::LOL:
I view tone controls / graphic equalizers / DSP etc as useful component in a good HiFi system, because unless you have a perfect signal source AND an amp that has perfectly flat characteristics AND speakers that also have a totally perfect linear response over the entire frequency range AND a room that has perfect acoustics AND you need perfect hearing then you need some way of compensating for the inadequacies of your setup.

The main job of a sound engineer at any live event is a pre-show sound check so they can set up the mixing desk to tune the sound to match the venue's acoustics. Give a sound engineer no way of adjusting the tone of his music and he'll tell you where you can stick your amplifier.

My boss is a former sound engineer who has bored me at length with tales of his time touring...
 
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