June 5, 1998

SoundStage! at Hi-Fi '98: An Introduction

by Doug Schneider, Publisher

After CES '98 in Las Vegas, I swore that I would never attempt "live" coverage of an audio show again. The stress of taking pictures, downloading in hotel lobbies, formatting on street corners, and the pain of attempting to locate an analog phone line to dial out proved much less enjoyable than I could have imagined. After CES '98—where we published online more pictures and coverage information than any other publication—we were stressed.

Any type of in-depth coverage is tough, and trying to do it fast is much tougher. Headroom's Tyll Hertsens pioneered the "on-the-spot" showgoing experience by covering HI-FI '97 for his own site. Tyll never talked about doing that again, and even tried to talk me out of it. Instead, he went on to a saner sort of insane reporting with the AirHeads web-toon. I should have heeded his warnings, I guess.

"dB," I said after we had finished day four at the CES, "never again, never again, never again."

Tyll simply said, "I told you so!"

Well, never say never. It's the beginning of June, and we're about to embark on another trip to one of the largest audio events of the year—and yes, we're going to do live coverage again. Are we stupid? Are we insane? Perhaps, but this time we have a plan, and we think we have the techniques and technologies mastered to the point where HI-FI '98 show coverage will be a breeze. In turn, we plan on giving you the best show coverage that you will see anywhere—print or online. So how will we do it?

Six ‘Stagers will be covering the show: Doug Blackburn, Dave Duvall, John Upton, Todd Warnke, Greg Weaver and myself. We have a master plan, and we will have the technology—no kidding. With laptops and digital cameras we will be visiting every room, documenting and formatting as we go. This will ensure high accuracy and lightning-fast publication. Following the close of each day, we will be uploading the highlights to our SoundStage! LIVE (www.soundstagelive.com) site. Simple!

Our coverage will be online every day of the show and for some time after. You will see new products, industry celebrities, interesting pictures and much, much more. Our goal this time is to have a great deal of fun and to communicate our experience in our show report. We hope that for our readers our coverage will be the next best thing to being at the show. Start checking in Wednesday June 10—we'll be SoundStage! LIVE from Los Angeles.

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