2012 National Meet Input Wanted!

Well its getting to be that time again.....2012 is almost here and that means another National Meet in the LA area!

Here are pics from the last event: http://events.hometheaterforum.com/hollywood2008/Welcome.html

To make this meet the best ever we would like your input:

• What have you liked best?
• What have you liked least?
• Was the Burbank Marriott a good hotel/location?
• What would you like to do that hasn't been done?
• Should we have more "technical" events (post production, sound design, disc authoring, etc).
• How long should it last?
• Should there be more free days?
• Any other thoughts?
• If you have never been, what would be the one event to make you come?

Looking forward to your feedback!

Great feedback.  Thanks!

Note to Cameron: Opening dinners have been a bit of a disaster lately, and come hell or high-water that will be different this time.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sam Posten 

Agree with Cameron, will post more tomorrow. When can I send deposit? Last time I think there was effort made to ensure that folks who never went to one could have a higher chance of getting in, I'm all for that but would hate to see any of the veterans getting locked out, it's been five years I wanna catch up with folks, lots has changed!!!

Good feedback Sam, and I look forward to seeing your other thoughts and catching up with you in person next year!  Rather than cutting people off it probably makes more sense to expand the number of attendees.  We may have to get creative then and have "electives" where on Wed you have to decide between option A and B, option A has only X slots first come first serve since some places like to limit us to smaller groups.

A few more questions for you two (and anyone else):

• We seem to do some of the same things every meet when it comes to studio tours, etc.  Do you guys enjoy this or does it seem repetitive and would you like to do different things?
• Would it be better for us to say that the meet costs $XXX single/$YYY double+air and hire an agency to put it together than the way we do it now: Bring money for carpool, bring money for opening dinner, bring money for hotel, etc?
• Should we look for more sponsors to cover things?  Upside is you might not pay for opening dinner, but you may have to give 15 minutes to some speaker manufacturer, studio or retailer.
   

That was a great session.  What about something like this: http://www.hometheaterforum.com/wiki/erik-aadahl-supervising-sound-editor-for-megamind-on-designing-a-mix-using-dolby-surround ?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sam Posten 

Unfortunately a couple of the trips are running together in my mind, so sorry if I confuse places. The Beverly is fine, it worked great for our purposes. I wasn't as big a fan of the other one, it was located centrally but I don't remember much else about it.


FRYS. That is all.

 

The new place (Marriott) was just a block from Fry's, about a 5 min walk.  I can't believe it didn't score higher than the Beverly with you for that reason alone!  Reason for the switch was because The Beverly wouldn't work with us last time on price or the SVS room, and the Marriott did.  The Marriott was also more centrally located to the events, was next to Fry's, and a few "cheap eats" places.  Plus really convenient for those of us flying into Burbank.  That doesn't mean that's where we will be staying this time.  Each meet booking a hotel is a new adventure with new challenges.

I'd love to involve more locals, but there are two challenges.  We need enough out of towners to get a discounted hotel rate and get the demo room included, and we are usually limited to 60 per studio.  I'll try to come up with more ways to include them.
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sam Posten 

Thanks Adam. I hope it's evident that I for one am very excited about being able to do this trip again and I'll do my best to help any way I can. I haven't been on a real vacation since the last one, so yeah, I'm ready for a fun trip!

Thanks.  Ron, Kevin and I have started talking about it and we want to try to make this the best meet ever, setting the bar so high that they will all be downhill from here .  That means looking at what has worked and not worked in the past.
 

LOL

We are actively starting to work on this and get the date nailed.  Right now its sometime late third quarter early 4th quarter.  We are looking at maybe making it a bit shorter (4-5 days) so people can have time to do some touristy stuff if they want in the LA area.

We are wanting to have a big studio event during the day, and an optional planned event each night.  We are thinking that it would be great to get studios like Twilight Time or Shout Factory (just examples at this point) to come out to the demo room in the evenings to have a chance to meet with members and show us what they are working on. 

Additionally we have some non-studio events that we are trying to incorporate (speaker design and testing facility, BD replication plant, etc) that may not be able to accommodate everyone so we are trying to figure out how to incorporate "electives" with transportation.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Frank Ha 

The dates are great for us. Phoebe and I had such a great time at the last meet. We definitely want to go again. Good thing HTF had a link with a hint about a special announcement on Facebook that I could click on, since I don't do Facebook.

Adam, do you still want input or is that over now that the 2012 meet has been announced? This thread was under my radar until today.

Frank - It will be great to see you guys again.  Input is good as we are going to be hard at work confirming what we will be doing in Jan/Feb and then it takes another month or two to massage the schedule.  I can say that we will be working on some additional evening events at the hotel with some smaller studios/labels (like Twilight Time for example) hosting screenings, Q&A etc.  The opening dinner is going back to the Hard Rock where we have had MUCH better experiences than recent locations.  If you have any feedback that you would like to share please do so....we always want to make these events better!