Intro
Contents
It’s a bit of a surprise. But when we went through our Google Pictures, we came to the conclusion that we are already working on Alpha Audio for more than ten years. Officially the domain ‘alpha-audio’ was registered in 2005 (The Dutch version). And before that – 2002 – it was known as audiofreak. But then it was nothing more than a hobby. From 2010 an on, we worked more and more on ‘Alpha’. And from 2011 and on, we used WordPress as a CMS and we started using statistics for insights. Well: 2011 – 2020: that’s about 10 years! Time for an overview. But for your information: we have no idea what we are going to see. So: let’s get surprised!Â
Why this article, you probably wonder. Very simple: author Yung suddenly sends a picture (with Whatsapp) with the remark: in 2015 we were already working on binaural recordings to see how we can bring recordings to the reader. And that triggered your author to dive into the Alpha Audio timeline. What have been real milestones for Alpha Audio? What were we doing ten years ago? Because, frankly, your author doesn’t remember either. Time for some research!
Now, of course, we can only share the high-lights. And there is less information from the early days, because our Google Photos does not go back to 2005 for example. But we still managed to find quite a lot of information. So here is an overview of ‘The Early Days’ until now.
BTW: this article is not so much about hi-fi equipment. It’s mainly about platform development and choices that have been made. More ‘behind the scenes’.
The early days
Alpha Audio (alpha-audio.nl) was registered as a domain in 2005. The picture of a very young Jaap you see above dates from around that time. The system at that time was built with a pair of Infinity Kappas, Arcam, Van Medevoort and Musical Fidelity. Later a Teac VRDS-7 and ’10’ were added. The Infinity’s were later replaced by a pair of Magnepans (0.6se). The Musical Fidelity was later swapped for a Proceed PDP-2 dac. That was a vey cool dac.
The website at the time was completely created in html. It was like that until 2010 even. At the end of 2010 we switched to WordPress. A much better system of course. We are still using it. Although the technology behind the new Alpha Audio it is totally different than in 2010. Think of security, caching, CDNs, etcetera.
