Week Twenty-One – Wherein I Get Treated Like My Ears Are Golden

I am going on pair of adventures this week that really sum up a faintly odd career. (FAINTLY!!! Guru) First I to go to KJ Leisure W1 on Wednesday to listen to a pair of £300,000 Sonus Faber ‘˜Aida’ speakers (Named for Verdi’s opera) with the Great & The Good of the UK HiFi reviewers’ community. To be included at this level is a true honour and a fabulous acknowledgement of some sort of high end credibility as a reviewer. I could be arrogant but in all truth I feel relief, as it is an odd way to make a living and being approved of by the posh nobs is pretty much all the reputation you could hope to carve. I swear that the big sexy speakers testing started at my house because I could unpack a dirty great enclosure with no excrescences to hang onto except the drivers’ frames and yet unpack them safely, unscratched. I wrap a fat arm around the naked box and lean backthings tend to come with when I do that.
Hopefully, the ‘˜getting it’ bit of even the most sophisticated transducer engineering is also part of the pie but simply not getting sued is a good sign. Mind you, some chap DID spend £40,000 on a set of KEF Reference surround sound speakers after getting the final shove from a review he read in Home Cinema Choice. I arrived at the Bristol HiFi Show to find that the KEF guys had blown the review up to 8×4 foot sized sheets and had it in their room, complete with my face on it. I didn’t quite know how to process that. A feeling I had again when I made the cover of the Anglers Mail with a big stripy fish my mate Ian Welch had put me on!
The day before though, I shall be at an old lunatic asylum hospital (top security, now disused) with a fabulously dressed dude, his fabulous Phoenix Gold Lexus and Si Gray, professional motoring photographer to do a feature we hope will go first into Fast Car (likely to be a staffer who’ll write it) and then here on Talk Audio. For helping make it happen (and getting Celsus and Kings to foot the pro snapper’s reduced-for-mates rates) Talk Audio gets a top pro shoot. Cool or what?
OK, still got the Hybrid Audio Technologies components here, as well as some subs to test, including a MIGHTY half kilowatt active Blaupunkt subwoofer! Yes Blaupunkt, 500 watts, active all in the same sentence!
Ok, I’ll go get on, then!
Adam Rayner On Line Editor