A Plea to Our Readers *** PLEASE READ ***

[MUDSHARK]

Coca-Cola cut back on their advertising once. It was then that they lost a portion of the market share to Pepsi that they have yet to reclaim AFAIK.

Just something I heard, don't ask me to back that up.

That occurred to the 1980's. Coca-Cola did not cut back but gambled wrong on sugar futures. Pepsi went the right way and the savings were astronomical. Pepsi put the savings in advertising (Remember the Michael Jackson and other celebrity commercials). Pepsi gained over 13 percent market share as I recall (I was a young auditor assigned to several of the Pepsi subsidiaries). Timing is everything.

 

[MidnightSensi]

This is a good reason for Internet direct companies, like Blue Jeans cables, to advertise here where their advertising means the most (hypothetically).

Yeah, that's a item that people might be more likely to buy right now.

Blowing out speakers now though, just doesn't make sense to me. The guy who isn't going to buy a 600 dollar speaker isn't going to buy a 450 dollar speaker either. If the difference of 150 dollars is making or breaking the deal for them now, they probably can't afford it anyways. I'm sure all speaker sales are down, but the budget stuff sold on volume has to be absolutely killed.

 

[jostenmeat]

A couple of interesting things I heard on public radio recently:

-Info-mercial companies are doing very, very well. Why? Since all other companies are scaling back their advertising, the infomercials have less and less competition.

-Many young and middle-aged men are delving a bit more into certain hobbies if only to engage our minds with something more fun than waiting out the economic bad times. Maybe there's something to this as far as AH's growing popularity.

Regarding "membership fees", I've been tempted slightly by a perk or two, but mainly just to support forums that I enjoy to the extent that I do. In fact, there's a different forum where the founder simply asked for money, because funds were running out. No perks. I donated, but I haven't visited that site in quite a long time . . .

I've already mentioned to certain folks about deals here. I also spread the news to other forums. Ok, I'll start clicking on a couple of ads, but ONLY for the products that I like. (There are one or two that I dislike).

 

[itschris]

I specifically let every online retailer I got my stuff from that I heard of them through this forum.

I'm not opposed at all to a membership fee. Because of this forum, I've saved thousands of dollars and believe that I've put the best system together that I could for the money I spent.

A couple of the other groups I belong to have membership areas that charge a fee. Think about it. It's not going to replace a high dollar advertiser I'm sure, but it will showcase the comittment of those who participate here to those advertisers.

 

[gene]

Is this your full time job here gene?

I kind of figured the hosting here was a few hundred a month and the ads paid for it plus a little extra. If your in the hole, you could just ask for donations, but they would have to be kept seperate from the commercial parts of this site.

Yes I quit my Senior Level Electrical Engineering job at Raytheon nearly 5 years ago to take this website full time where it also employees 3 more full time people (Clint, Tom and my wife) as well as nearly a dozen contractors. This does not include the Audioholics E-store which is an entirely separate entity run and managed independent of this website.

As far as donations, that isn't necessary, but the gesture is appreciated. But frequenting our advertisers, E-store and eventual membership service is appreciated.

 

[Adam]

Shucks, Gene. You could be designing new and better ways to microwave people. However, you chose instead to help us out with our A/V needs. I, for one, am glad that you made that choice! Well, not because I don't like people getting microwaved - I just like A/V gear a lot.

 

[gene]

Shucks, Gene. You could be designing new and better ways to microwave people. However, you chose instead to help us out with our A/V needs. I, for one, am glad that you made that choice! Well, not because I don't like people getting microwaved - I just like A/V gear a lot.

Well I didn't nuke anyone but I did design most of the key audio systems in NAOC (defense plane) some of which are used at the oval office. I still crack up when they asked me to design an Isolated speaker system that could separate Red (secure)and Black (non secure) audio and their output spec was 90dB @ 1 meter from 200Hz to 4kHz +-3dB. I gave them 96dB from 100Hz to 6kHz +- 1dB and had to scale back the balanced differential amplifier outputs b/c they were initially outputting over 100dB! I used a really high quality Vifa fiberglass woofer instead of the lame paper wizzer cone used for most military applications. I even had Vifa certify it was flame resistant and met all of our specs. The Vifa driver cost 1/2 the crappy military one and one of the Generals commented that this Speaker sounded better than his home stereo. I presume he was a Bose owner