Way back in 2011, I covered THE first T.H.E. Newport Beach Show for Stereophile. And I remember thinking—beach!
I wheeled my carry-on to the taxi area outside the John Wayne Airport and saw a guy waiting, smoking, at the curb who looked like a hifi guy (tan khakis / logo polo) :
“Hey! You going to the Newport Beach Show?”
“I am.”
“Wanna share a cab?” I said with all the enthusiastic naïveté of a cub reporter in a foreign land for the first time.
“You see that?” he replied, pointing across the street to a high rise hotel as the smoke from his butt rose even higher. “That’s the Hilton.”
While it’s not every show, some of ‘em are named after places they’re just not in. T.H.E. Newport Beach Show was a 20 minute drive to Newport Beach, Capital Audiofest billed as a Washington DC show is in Rockville, MD, and now we have news of the new location for the upcoming T.H.E. New York International Audio Show which will take place at the Hilton Hasbrouck Heights. In New Jersey.
But I get it. Of course we get it. How sexy is T.H.E. Hasbrouck Heights International Audio Show? Heck—I was born and raised in the Garden State mere miles from Hasbrouck Heights as well as being a lifelong New York Giants fan as painful as that has more than occasionally been and remains so who play within spitting distance of Hasbrouck Heights. In New Jersey. Is this a case of geography shaming?
On the other hand, we have the proud-to-be-where-we-actually-are hifi shows. Munich, Bristol, Montreal, Paris, Tokyo, and Warsaw to name but a few. Perhaps a nice happy medium are the regionally named shows—the Pacific Audio Fest, the Southwest Audiofest, and the satellite’s eye view Axpona Audio Expo North America which is clearly a better choice than Axpona Schaumburg (apologies Schaumburgans).
If you peek behind the names, you’ll see that the Pacific Audio Fest and Southwest Audiofest are organized by the same people while the T.H.E Show SoCal, T.H.E. New York International Audio Show, and the Lone Star AudioFest (I have to wonder why not T.H.E. Show Austin or thereabouts) all fall under the same T.H.E. umbrella. Of course the Montreal Audiofest isn’t associated with either. [footnote 1]
So I get it.
Then again, I don’t. Other than to note that our wonderful world of hifi is a free flying affair.
1. If your inner editor is feeling a bit queasy, you are reading the variations right—Audiofest, Audio Fest, and AudioFest. I’ll assume they are equally festive (i.e. Fest Ive, FestIve).