Sweetwater Gearfest, 2009
Originally published at The Null Device Blog. You can comment here or there.
This past weekend, Dan and I headed down to Fort Wayne, IN to Sweetwater Gearfest, a big ol’ trade show/convention/workshop for audio nerds. And both of us being audio nerds, this was a good place for us.
Never having been to one before, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would it be just a lot of glorified sales pitches by Sweetwater staff? Would it be a big meet-n-greet? Would it be like NAMM or MusikMesse where vendors trot out their big upcoming products and try to impress you with their marginally-functional experimental stuff? Would it be a big tradeshow? Would it be a lot of beardy guys standing around arguing about tube manufacturers?
It turned out to be a none of those things. Oh, sure, there was a tradeshow aspect of it, and that was alright. Vendors were there in spades, but they were pretty much only showing off what they had, not their upcoming stuff. The sales staff was not pushy at all, and was more than accomodating to questions. The only really esoteric flamewar I saw was a brief bit of the Manley reps casting aspersions on solid-state gear by tossing off some facts about linear harmonic distortion.
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