Turkey here I come. After the madness of CEDIA with its filming and Podcasting and reporting and posting and voiceovering (is that a word?), I’m done and off to Turkey. For those of you that haven’t heard the Podcast, my wife is half Turkish and we are going to visit her family. Well, technically, we’re going to go hang out on the beach but her family will be nearby. This will actually be the first time the kids have ever seen any of the Turks and only the second time for me. My wife and I, before we were married, traveled together and we spent a few days in Turkey so I’ve seen many of the important faces.

But really, this post isn’t about me, it’s about you. Dina and J have been kind enough to submit to my grueling “We need to do another Podcast RIGHT NOW!” schedule and helped me make sure that you weren’t going to be left with no new content for the next few weeks while I worked on my tan. The next two episodes will star J in two new Ask AVRants which will touch on speaker efficiency, ohms, HDMI, and video processing. After that, Dina will return for a couple of episodes centered around movies, subwoofers, transports, and what is the best “money is no object” system. By then, barring catastrophic incident, I will be back, the Audioholics party will be looming on the horizon, and the CEDIA video will be published giving plenty of fodder for new Podcasts. Oh, and I am supposed to spend a little time with one of my wife’s relatives who is a self proclaimed Audiohphile. That should be interesting.

Keep emailing Dina and I and calling the Off Line Rant Line (978.633.7268) with your comments and questions. I won’t have much internet access (it really wouldn’t be much of a vacation if I did) but I will be looking through everything once I get back. If my 2 days off line at CEDIA is any indication, I’ll be looking at about 850 emails of which 795 will be spam. Joy.

This might be old news to some of you but Dina and I got a kick out of it. Feel free to vote on your favorite below:

While I was away in Boston, Captain Evil (my youngest son) decided it would be cool to run behind the sub and turn the volume all the way up. Now, generally speaking, that shouldn’t be an issue but apparently it was. So I get back and notice the lack of bass and figure out the problem. Blew both the fuses on the sub. I run down to radio shack and get two new fuses and install them. No problem. Green light is back on, everything seems to be working properly… until I go to calibrate. Now it’s clear that the sub is dead. This is an Axiom EP500 and is probably way out of warranty so I give them a call. I have to tell them my name but I don’t say I’m with Audioholics. They ask me to run a few tests and sure enough, dead as a doornail. The CSR on the phone says he’ll refer me to their service department (they are a small company so it’s probably 2 guys) who will email me soon. That was about 4 hours ago. No email yet. I’ll keep you informed.

Speaking of which, anyone on the market for a 17 month old boy. Can walk, starting to talk, exceptionally cute, but has a bad habit of killing subwoofers. Will accept a JL Audio F113 in trade OBO.

Now that I’m on the plane back from my Boston Acoustics press event, what are my final thoughts? I thought that overall, the BA team did a very good job of hosting a very enjoyable event. The food was good (I finally had some lobster last night) and the BA staff were knowledgeable and approachable. While some people might have a problem approaching and striking up a conversation with the VP of Everyone, I don’t seem to have that bone in my body. I don’t know if that is an asset or not, but it is a fact. Half the time I don’t know what position people hold until long after I talk to them. This means that just about everyone gets the full “Tom experience.” Hopefully that won’t reflect too poorly on Audioholics ;).
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The first thing you learn on a press event is that you can’t talk about anything… yet. It’s always, “Not a word until Monday” or “You can talk about this after CEDIA” or “We’ll let you know.” So, for now, I can’t get into specifics but perhaps you all would be interested in knowing what happens during one of these junkets. Now I’ve only been on two but I’ve already started to pick up on some similarities:

1) The first night there is a dinner. Usually with lots of food and LOTS of wine. This is to loosen you up after your long (for some of us) trip and (most importantly) to insure that you are up late and a little hung over for the next morning. A tired and hung over press is a docile press. Little did they know that my liver is the strongest muscle in my body and that I normally operate on 3-4 hours of sleep.
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