Recap & Postmortem of RMAF 2010:
This year's RMAF was an all-around fantastic time. I ended up not listening to much gear, but I was expecting that - I went more to hang out with some folks I know and take some time off from work, plus the food and drinks were a cool bonus too. It was great to see everyone - the local Colorado Head-Fiers along with other stalwarts from around the country that I've gotten to know over the years (too many people to name). And RMAF itself wasn't bad either, from what I was able to check out. I've been told that it's hoped that this "CanJam@RMAF" will be an annual event which sounds great for the local Head-Fi community - everyone in Colorado should attend this in the future! There's absolutely no reason to miss this for anyone into either speakers or headphones - while CanJam@RMAF isn't really indicative of what "CanJam" actually is (as in, the National Meets that are organized by a regional team), it's still the best & biggest headphone-related event in Colorado and a huge portion of the vendors that have showed up at CanJam in years past made the trip out to CanJam@RMAF too.
It was great to go out to eat and drink with some fellow Head-Fiers (plus folks from another forum). For those folks in Denver who don't already know about these places, you should definitely try these: Larkburger, Great Northern Tavern, Cherry Cricket, Falling Rock Tap House, & Sahara Restaurant. (I'm not exactly local to Denver myself and don't usually go out to eat either, which explains why I didn't know about them beforehand.) There was also a new beer I tried which was especially good: Left Hand Milk Stout. 
As for this year's episode of CanJam@RMAF following on from last year's, I thought this year showed that there was a higher average of folks who were familiar with computer audio. I was expecting my laptop PC setup to get barely any listening from show attendees but was surprised that most people ended up listening on it instead of my CD player setup. I still had to walk some people through the software though, which made it obvious that folks were interested but probably didn't know how to use a computer that well.
I also want to add that it was insulting when I said hi to random people who walked by the Head-Fi member tables but they said absolutely nothing in response and walked on past. This happened too many times to overlook and it reminded me of last year when the same thing happened. The only thing I can conclude is that the average RMAF attendee is rude, self-centered, & anti-social. It made me wonder why I was at RMAF in the first place and if I was wasting my time by being there. Fortunately the rest of the RMAF experience outweighed this one sour aspect for me though.
My visit to the speaker rooms went as expected: most rooms were playing the standard classical/film soundtrack, jazz, & female vocal-type music. In other words, music that was barely challenging any of the speakers at the show. There were several rooms where I was inspired to play Massive Attack ("Inertia Creeps"), In Flames ("Artifacts of the Black Rain"), or Symphony X ("Set the World on Fire"). When I brought out my In Flames CD in the Aperion Audio room, the rep played a Tool CD for me next (don't know which one, as I'm not very familiar with Tool yet) which I thought was cool.
The seminar panel that included Jude (Head-Fi's founder and main admin) was nice & informative. One subject that was brought up was how to attract younger people into the audiophile hobby and Head-Fi was cited there, along with social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter). Another thing that was brought up was hi-res files and downloading, which someone admitted was still a niche but he saw it as a point of future expansion to attract younger people, as the conventional thinking was that "young people" prefer to download music instead of buying CDs or vinyl. There was some thought & agreement that the major recording labels should release much more content as downloads.
To conclude my recap/postmortem, I sincerely hope that future CanJam@RMAFs will be even more successful than this year's to broaden the Head-Fi audience, and I'm sure the other local Head-Fi folks in Colorado will help see to that. I will not be one of them though - this was my last RMAF.
Axpona 2011 (April 15-17 in Atlanta, GA) was being advertised at RMAF too and that show looks promising and will probably be a lot better than this year's was (the Jacksonville FL show left a lot to be desired).
Also for those folks who use HDTracks, this was also being advertised: 20%-off one-time discount with coupon code "rmaf20", expires 10/30.
Edited by Asr - 10/24/10 at 11:04pm
