In the first of what will undoubtedly be many articles on the subject, Lin and Stu look back on the formative years of HiFi Pig.

It seems like only yesterday and yet almost a lifetime ago that we tentatively launched the fledgling HiFi Pig. That’s right, folks, if you haven’t guessed already HiFi Pig is celebrating ten years of “Snoofling Out What’s Hot in HiFi”.

Originally I’d started writing about HiFi by way of keeping me occupied having been fired from my job in Bordeaux for telling my then boss what I thought of his customer care. I remember when we first decided to move what was then a stream of consciousness blog loosely held together by the theme of HiFi to a proper server and thought that spending a tenner a month on a shared server was a bit of an indulgence. But, hey, people were looking at the site and I distinctly remember getting very excited when Google analytics showed someone (ANYONE) looking at the site. By this time, I was working in sales and running a small business called Smith’s Sales and Marketing which was doing great; we’d won the contract to recruit and train salespeople to franchisees of the biggest online expat network in the world with millions of users. It was all looking very positive and to badly quote the tune, the future was so bright, I had to wear shades. HiFi Pig was very much a hobby, but one that I loved doing and feedback looked great – if you call great having a hundred people a day visiting your site.

A few months in we went out to dinner at some friends and the conversation turned to business. I wasn’t enjoying the recruiting and training of people remotely at all, although I did get to know some cool people through it and we almost considered taking one of the franchised sites on ourselves as a bit of a side-hustle. Recruiting folk to do a twenty-hour working week is not as easy as it sounds and I remember taking one phonecall from a woman responding to one of our ads and her saying “Oh, I don’t think I could commit to the full twenty hours, I have horses.” Anyway, as I said, at dinner the conversation turned to what we were doing business-wise and my main topic was HiFi Pig and the guy we were dining with said fairly matter of factly “Pack the sales training and recruitment in and concentrate on HiFi Pig!” and so we did. We set the salespeople we’d trained free and, to be honest, I was happy not to be having to manage so many people on a day to day basis. HiFi Pig was all we did, and it is all we have done since then. We are not part-time contributors and we don’t have day jobs. We live, breathe, and sleep HiFi Pig. It’s a lifestyle as well as our job. It’s a passion and not a chore! However, we’d just packed in a nice little earner to step into the unknown.

The site grew organically but we still didn’t have an income from it and seriously thought about buying that franchise, and then one day totally out of the blue came a phonecall from Tufan at Roksan. He’d been following the site and wanted an in. I put the phone down and could hardly believe it – we’d only gone and sold a sponsorship deal to one of the most well-loved and well known British brands in the industry. From there it snowballed. Around this same kind of time rumours abounded that we were going to be buying out a well-known if rambunctious forum – no way, José! Part of my job with the ex-pat group had been setting up forums around the world and I’d had quite enough of that, thank you very much!

We had the sponsorship, but we knew that if we were to be taken seriously we had to get ourselves to the Munich High-End show. It was the Mecca for audio and we had to attend. Slight problem was that sponsorship money had to pay mortgages, taxes and living expenses for a family of four. We certainly couldn’t fly and we couldn’t afford half-decent hotels. A four-hour train to Paris and the overnight to Munich was the only way to do it on our limited budget. We arrived at milkman-o’clock with a couple of suitcases, a camera and a couple of notepads and headed straight to the less than salubrious hotel where we dropped out bags and hoofed it to the show. This was it! This was our shot! We were giddy with excitement and not a little nervous. Our nerves became even more fraught when we saw the scale of the High-End show – if you’ve never been it’s almost impossible to comprehend how big this show is and I’d not be surprised if some folk get there for the first time, freak out and hotfoot it back to their hotel to hide for the duration of the event – but that wasn’t an option for us! We arrived unannounced and we assumed no one knew us, but we had to stand out somehow. Advertising was out, I think we’d had a few hundred business cards printed up. This is how Lin’s bright HiFi Pig Pink hair came about and the handful of contacts we had made were told to look out for that. We went around the show and introduced ourselves to people from all over the world and people didn’t seem overly surprised to see us there. And then we went up to the stand of Lawrence Lau from Hong Kong and did our usual “Hello, you won’t have heard of us but we’re Lin and Stu from HiFi Pig…” at which point, and in a very Chinese accent, Laurence shouted “Hifi Pig! I Love HiFi Pig!” As far as I was concerned the world could have ended then and I’d have died a happy man. We’d made it and folk knew who we were. We covered and wrote about every single room at that show and spoke to absolutely everyone who would acknowledge us.

The rest is history really and you can look back in the HiFi Pig archives to see what’s happened since then. There have been many, many highlights and no doubt during this celebratory year I’ll end up trotting out a good few of them. As I write this one that stands out is at the fabulous Warsaw Show (thanks Adam for putting on such a magnificent event) walking around the corridors of the national stadium and a group of guys prodding each other, pointing at Lin and I, clearly knowing who we were and being so pleased to feel part of the extended HiFi Pig family when we stopped and said hello. Another was at the Munich event a few years after our first tentative visit where Lin was walking around the show chatting with the legend that is Laurence Dickie who designed the famous Nautilus (and many other) speakers. A visitor to the show stopped the pair and asked for a selfie. Needless to say, Lin got out the way and left the guy to have his photograph with this audio colossus only for him to tell her that is was only her he wanted to photograph with. Obviously, she explained that it was Laurence who was the star of the show but obliged anyway.

A few days prior to me beginning writing this a pretty well-known commissioning editor for a niche music magazine contacted me and during the course of the conversation made the comment that HiFi Pig had really disrupted the status-quo in the HiFi industry over the last ten years. I take that as a huge compliment and whilst I see us as being very much part of the HiFi-Industry furniture now I hope that we still manage to disrupt and influence (in a small way) how the industry sees itself and acts. I know at least some are taking notice as I see sites that have been set up since seeing our success using similar language and style of writing in reviews and op-ed pieces.

I said earlier that HiFi Pig has become our way of life and that’s the truth. We really do work at this all the time and so much so that it’s difficult to separate the lines where HiFi Pig stops and our personal lives begin – that’s all good by me. A wiser man than I (Mark Twain) once said “Find a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life” and you know what, he was right.

Thank you to all the people within and without the industry who have given and continue to give us support and encouragement, we really do appreciate it and feel honoured that you see us as worthy of being a part of this wonderful industry.

Thank you to all the people we have worked with and have conducted reviews for us, and especially to the fantastic team we have onboard now!

HiFi Pig is something that I am immeasurably proud of and, as Stu says above, it has become much more than a job, it’s our way of life. HiFi Pig is as much about the people as it is about the gear, and that’s not just Stu and I, it’s all the team of people that have reviewed for us, past and present, the brands and distributors that have trusted in us enough to send us their gear to review and to support us by advertising on HiFi Pig. It’s the PR people that build relationships with us and want their brands to feature on the site and the HiFi Show organisers around the world that want us to cover their shows, and of course it’s the readers. From watching just a few people reading the site ten years ago to the thousands a day that read it now, we appreciate every one of you. Without your belief in us there would be no HiFi Pig. One of the most satisfying things in the world is to write something for the website, for example a show report, and have readers comment that it made them feel like they were there, or to meet readers at a show and them to tell you how much they love reading HiFi Pig, even how it helps them learn English.

We very much feel that HiFi Pig is a HiFi website for all, it’s not a clique, it’s not a ‘boys club’, it’s for real people with real audio needs and real aspirations. We have always, and will continue to, cover everything from small brands just starting out with an affordable new product, to the craziest, esoteric HiFi that costs the price of a small country. We snoofle out the interesting stuff and what will entertain and interest our readers.

Thank you for the last ten years of supporting HiFi Pig, we hope you stick with us for the next years yet to come…remember HiFi Pig loves you!

#TenYearsOfHiFiPig

Mr and Mrs HiFi Pig

AKA Lin and Stu