It was never in doubt that our little blog revival would do well, despite only registering a few post a month, a far, far cry from our past posting records. As our readership rises, with almost non-existent fanfare, we somehow started to get calls from hifi dealers. They noticed! Which is always a good sign of our influence in thoughts.
We have been offered to do reviews of hifi cables & equipment, invited to attend events, request for preview write ups, even offers to pay for advertising. All those things we previously did for the sake of helping to promote the hifi & AV industry. I have so far turned downed all those request & offers. As some of the more keen eyed readers have asked me last week, "I noticed the rebooted HiFi-Unlimited has no advertising panels, unlike previously, what happened?" My reply to this reader would be the same as all those dealers who contacted me. I have agreed with Tan, my long time partner in crime, that this blog would now serve more like our personal space of hifi & AV related expression, yes a personal space for us to SKL(Sin Ka Lan). When we decided on the reboot, we agreed there would be very little room for commercialism here in these pages, unless it's a specific product that we are really curious about, or maybe a very dear hifi cause that is close to our hearts.
Even if we agreed to do "that very specific product review", there are terms & conditions:
1) There must be no deadlines, but we promise not to take much longer than we need to complete the said review.
2) It must be delivered to us for the review & pick up from us after we are finished, we do not collect or send back like before.
3) There will be no guarantees that it will be a favorable review. We will publish our un-censored thoughts about the subject matter, without prior consultation what so ever. In other words, it will be a total surprise!
4) We promise not to ask for review fee or solicit for advertisement or sponsorship of any kind!
Now I want to see how many hifi dealers are up for this challenge!
And then, a funny thing recently happened is that a new reader who was recommended by his friend to read this blog sent me a Whatsapp message, questioning what qualifies me to review equipment and other people's system? My answer is simple, I replied to him to read the articles in this blog from it's very inception, which will take some time, but if he'd do that, he'd understand where we come from, and what we are about. A few days later, I got another message from this same chap, offering me to review his system. I declined but offered to buy him a cuppa instead. We met at a coffee shop spoke for a couple of hours about hifi instead. I have new hifi buddy now....................
Sometimes the weirdest things happens when our readers interact with us. In the mean time, we will just Keep Calm & Shiok Sendiri!
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