Forum Alternatives

ViperZ

I am more active on CanuckAudioMart forums - another example where a group of people went with something other than vBulletin, but MADE IT WORK. I do find myself visiting AK and AVS forums more often too. I just can't get myself to read this childishly designed forum, or figure out how to change settings to make it readable.

kevhed72

Just me me a more tablet friendly version of this, and I'm good. I'm not going to hang out at Emo, and the avs forum gives me a headache. I will say I miss Rick88s posts though.

nspindel

I've often questioned how much Polk actually likes this forum. Years of working in large corporations makes me believe that the impact of these changes were not accidental.

On the one hand, we certainly have put good publicity next to the Polk name, and one would think Polk benefits from that. On the other hand, I think the message that gets delivered rather consistently here is that Polk's vintage products are where the magic is. Especially with MP not owning the company any more, it would seem to me that the view of corporate management would be that there is little value in promoting the vintage lines, they'd rather attract people to the current production lines.

The corporation makes no money from me going on Craigslist, buying 25 year old Polk speakers, and rebuilding them with boutique capacitors, inductors, resistors, and isolation transformers. Granted they may sell me a few replacement tweeters, but I suspect that's not a major line item in their business plan. Alternatively, things like gaming headsets do appear to be part of the business plan, and we saw how well the gaming headset world fit in with this community.

So when I see things like all the links being broken to the treasure chest of information that's been compiled about the vintage speaker lines, it makes me think "Hmmmmm, they could fix that if they really wanted to." But I don't think they want to. They'd rather have google searches end up bringing people to current products.

It's kind of like antique cars. If I see a beautiful 1957 Chevy driving down the road, it doesn't make me want a 2015 Chevy. It makes me want an old one! And Chevy doesn't make a profit when I buy an old car, or when I start buying replacement parts from third-party suppliers. They'd much rather I buy a new one.

sucks2beme

It was a dollars and cents move.
All dollars and NO sense.
Money was at the bottom of it. It costs $$$ to maintain.
How many times do I see this at work? A quick chop
of the IT budget, and in the end it costs more that was saved.

nspindel

It's more than looking to save some money on the IT budget. If they really wanted to, it would take a programmer one day to build a script that would traverse the entire post history and translate the old links to point to the new forum. The fact that they have not done this is very telling.

WilliamM2

nspindel wrote: »

It's more than looking to save some money on the IT budget. If they really wanted to, it would take a programmer one day to build a script that would traverse the entire post history and translate the old links to point to the new forum. The fact that they have not done this is very telling.

I think it is just to save money. They haven't even fixed the headers (Clubhouse is under "Flea Market" for example). And the "Archives" are now open for posting. They aren't willing to pay for even one hours labor to fix trivial issues.

They probably don't see any reason to waste money on it. The forum really wasn't all that active the last few years anyways. The old forum had statistics on the bottom. "Most users ever online" was listed as 1700+ sometime in 2007. Even before the change there was rarely more than 30 to 40 users online at once recently.

Not the first forum I've seen die, and many were much larger that this, with 50K posts a day. And now they are gone. Welcome to social media.

nspindel

Bottom line is that if corporate management felt that this forum was a worthwhile investment that would contribute positively to their bottom line, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

tonyb

All good points gents...and some probably closer to spot on than you realize. So...still means diddly in the end.

To me the differences are in the beginning, Polk was owned by an audiophile first, business man second. Other companies are too as I previously mentioned. These owners are audiophiles first and foremost and it shows in the products they put out.

Can't say Polk falls into that category anymore. I guess any Tom, Dick and Harry can order Chinese speaker parts, throw them in a cabinet and slap a brand name on them to meet a price point without giving any heart and soul into it like Matt Polk did.

Speaker cabinets, bracing....parts....tuning everything, can be done by anyone really. Anyone with some skill anyway. That's pretty much what the general speaker market is, the mass marketed speakers. All using similar parts and cabinets, different brand names slapped on them. That's why many focus on the smaller owner operated companies like Salk....where you know you get some attention and if you want to change parts/cabinets....you can. You can talk to an owner about your specific needs, get recommendations. These smaller companies can afford to use better parts because their overhead is lower and they depend on audio forums/shows for most their marketing and don't have inflated payrolls for bigshots. See, these audiophile first companies aren't holding greed as the most important factor to their business model. They enjoy what they do and as long as they can make some money at it, they'll continue. They don't need pie charts explaining what percentage of market share they should go after....nor do they need a boat load of high salaried advisers fresh out of college who proclaim will take them into the 21st century and make them millions. Nope....the true audiophiles know who those companies are and will continue to support them. The rest offering gimmicks, cheap Chinese electronics will concentrate on the masses who want cheap products....kinda like Wal-Mart. Everyone knows if your after quality, wally world isn't going to be your first stop. Yet they sell tons of stuff. Audio companies are no different, you have your Wal-Mart audio companies, and your higher end quality driven companies.

Maybe Polk feels that since wages are stagnant and spendable income is being stretched....that the lower ticket items are the wave of the future. That's not a far fetched plan of attack. It's also a good way to gauge the health of an economy, by what companies are doing.

Social media is replacing forums as someone suggested, I agree with that, but that's a phony baloney way of creating brand loyalty. It's all garbage in my book. What can you do though ? If Polk wants to support social media over their forum, then you live or die by the choices you make. Time will tell won't it ?

ken brydson

tonyb wrote: »

Can't say Polk falls into that category anymore. I guess any Tom, Dick and Harry can order Chinese speaker parts, throw them in a cabinet and slap a brand name on them to meet a price point without giving any heart and soul into it like Matt Polk did.

Can't say D i c k, must use Richard....

voltz

LOL I work with several Richards and I'm always teasing them not to be a Richard

(Social media is replacing forums as someone suggested, I agree with that, but that's a phony baloney way of creating brand loyalty.) YEP!!