Welcome to Gy8, a dedicated audio reviewing and listening space established in the heart of Europe.

With three separate and dedicated listening rooms, unfettered access to its largest space and a central location, Gy8 was established to offer the opportunity to work with and review the finest audio equipment – just as this site was first established to provide visiting manufacturers and those who read the reviews with information and an insight into the listening rooms themselves. But since then, a lot has changed…

The Covid 19 Pandemic has had far reaching consequences, not least for the audio industry and its customers. The world has changed and so has the audio market. Print magazines in particular have found themselves under massively increased financial pressure. The price of printing and paper have both increased significantly. It leaves them more beholden than ever to commercial considerations and the influence of their advertisers. It’s a situation that impacts on what gets reviewed and, just as importantly, how it gets reviewed. It also means that any article that fails to offer a clear commercial opportunity – in terms of ad sales or reprints – is unlikely to make the pages. Amongst that category you can count: longer reviews of complex or ground-breaking products (every page costs and has to pay its way); system reviews (unless they come from a single manufacturer or distributor); product reviews from new or emerging manufacturers (unless they have a significant advertising budget); technique pieces that cover system matching and set-up; discussion about wider aspects of system performance or appreciation. In fact – pretty much the real meat of magazines past.

But these things matter. Why create a dedicated listening facility and allow its activities and experiences to be ‘gated’ or limited by narrow commercial interests. Which is why I decided to start publishing articles on the Gy8 site: articles that deal with products in the considerable depth they deserve; articles that cover aspects of individual product or system tuning and set up; articles about the ‘behind the reviews’ aspect of working with audio equipment. In short – the sort of articles that I always wanted to read. I’ll continue to work with Marc Mickelson and write for TheAudioBeat, one of the very few online sites that really exploits the opportunities presented by the web. But I can write more than Marc can use, and the Gy8 site gives me the space to cover less mainstream, more eclectic and frankly, some seriously niche products and issues.

I also decided to make the site free of advertising and the commercial pressures that go with it. That allows me to write about those products I choose – pretty much, the ones that I feel are worth writing about. It also allows me to write about any aspect of audio and the process of reproducing music. It allows me to take the odd article from similarly minded writers…

This is not Consumer Reports or Which? magazine. What I’m offering here is opinion and observation – the result of many years spent working with products as well as working with their designers and manufacturers. If the conclusions are general, they are the result of a very personal perspective – a perspective that many manufacturers will tell you can be scathingly critical and is firmly performance focussed.

And in the spirit of transparency…

My wife works as a marketing consultant and her clients currently include several audio companies. She works with CH Precision and Wadax. She worked in the past with Nordost. She is also an experienced listener and music lover (she owned a high-end system before we got together). Our work remains separate. She has her views and I have mine – unless that is, I want corroboration of some arcane tweak. In that case, if I can’t demonstrate it to her, it doesn’t get written about! Otherwise my views are very much my own and the only affect of her activities on mine is that I get to play with more equipment from the companies with which she works, more often and often earlier in the process, gaining a considerably greater insight into those products along the way.