We had a fabulous time at KJ West One's showcase of our pre-amplifier.
We wanted to convey the hand-made to order nature of our products and give visitors a taste of Hastings, the town on the south coast of England where we live and work.
We sourced some wood salvaged from Hastings Pier after a fire tragically destroyed much of the structure (it's since been rebuilt and repurposed into a flexible attraction for the 21st century) and made it into a table on which we served Sussex cheeses, local wines from Sedlescombe wine and beer from our favourite of Hastings' many fine pubs, the FILO.
We arrived at KJ West One at about 2 o'clock in the afternoon and loaded in the pre-amplifiers and the rest of the furniture and literature we'd brought - and the beer! KJ's manager Jason had spent the morning assembling a system around our pre-amplifier. He'd chosen Wilson Audio Yvette loudspeakers from and a McIntosh MC452 amplifier. The sources were a VERTERE turntable for analogue and a complete DCS Vivaldi system for digital.
Jason explained that he could have assembled a significantly more expensive system and remained confident that our pre-amplifier would still be a key component, but he felt listeners might assume that any pre-amplifier in such a system would sound great, so he opted for a slightly more modest set up.
The system sounded unquestionably exceptional – KJ West One is world renowned for a reason!
We spent the afternoon building our table and filling it with delicious food and drink before the first visitors arrived. We'd also brought along our transformer winding machine and set it up in KJ's upstairs demonstration room so we could show visitors how we make the transformers which are at the heart of our pre-amplifier.
The event was limited to forty visitors and was fully subscribed in advance. Because demand was so high Jason opted to split the evening into two listening sessions. Each group was invited into KJ's beautiful basement demonstration room.
We gave a brief introduction to our company and our pre-amplifier before Jason played some music. The system sounded fantastic and the response was extremely positive. It was great to be able to talk to listeners about specific aspects of what we do and to take their questions.
After the listening sessions we spent a very enjoyable time talking to guests one on one and several visitors took the opportunity to see some transformer winding up close.
It was late by the time the last visitors had left and we'd packed everything back into our car for the trip home. Jason locked the shop up and we said goodbye before he headed off to catch the last train home and we set off across London and back to Hastings in significantly easier traffic than we'd had earlier in the day.
We would like to extend our most sincere thanks and appreciation to everyone who came along and to our friends at KJ West One for their hard work leading up to and during the event and for hosting such an enjoyable evening.