While the rest of the Tech.co.uk team were hacking away at their laptops back in the office on Friday, Rob and I were hacking around the Sound & Vision hi-fi show . Every year it's held in the Marriot Hotel in downtown Bristol, with countless hi-fi companies occupying every room on the first four floors, showing off their new speakers and amplifiers.
To be honest, it's not the most exciting trade show that we get to go to, but you do sometimes come out of it with a good story and so we couldn't really afford not to attend.
And so we trundled around the hotel, trying to resist the luring siren-like temptations of the bar on the first floor.
After we'd been stunned somewhat by visiting tens of companies who were all claiming that their multi-thousand pound hi-fi systems were the best you can buy, we stopped by the AVI hi-fi room which was somewhat different.
AVI mastermind Ashley James was doing something poles apart from what everyone else was up to... Instead of hooking his new £1,000 ADM9 speakers up to a CD player, he had them connected to.... a Mac mini playing MP3s.
Not only that, but he was promoting MP3 audio as a perfectly legitimate source of music and said that the files only sound bad when played through inferior speakers. We left him to it and revisited his room at the end of the day to have a chat with him about his ideas further...
Not only did he then continue to advocate compressed music formats, but also proceeded to slate the rest of the hi-fi industry, accusing them of heinously ripping off innocent consumers, he criticised the hi-fi press for misleading readers and he said that Mac products were miles better than most high-end CD players. Not only that, but he gave an abundant list of good reasons to back up every point he made.
We'll be printing what Ashley James had to say with a series of news stories over the next few days. And trust me, you won't want to miss this...
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