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Before donating to Good Will an old Hitachi mini DVD recorder that was so "high-tech" in 2005, it was necessary to transfer all of the useful footage. So here are the "highlights" culled from hours of stuff including the 2006 Stereophile show at the New York Hilton—Stereophile's final sponsored show.

For some reason there's not much footage from the show but there is some from an "ask the editors" panel (but not enough).

The video and audio quality are good to "meh", the camera work sometimes worse than "meh" but there's still some other interesting stuff: including visits to Focal in France, T+A in Germany, Verity Audio in Quebec, and CES 2005 when HDTV was finally getting off the ground, Sirius made the big announcement that Howard Stern was leaving terrestrial radio and moving over to Sirius and the founding members of METAlliance made an appearance.

METAlliance is the Music Engineering & Technology Alliance. Shown in the YouTube thumbnail are (L-R) the late Phil Ramone, Chuck Ainlay, George Massenburg, Al Schmitt, (unknown, sorry), Elliot Scheiner, Frank Filipetti, (unknown, sorry) and Ed Cherney.

Biggest takeaway was learning the difference between walking through a show as an individual and considering what the viewer would see, which is one reason the show video is so lousy. However, keep in mind that YouTube opened for business on February 14th 2005 so when these videos were shot it wasn't done with YouTube viewers or any viewers in mind. It was more like home movies, and that's obvious!

As for the picture at the top, it's of a "digital head shell". The analog gets converted to digital at the head shell and then....I don't think it ever made it into production but it was an interesting idea!