The European Image and Sound Association (EISA) is Europe’s most ubiquitous and prestigious consumer electronics body. Last month, the nano iDSD was announced winner of the coveted EISA 2014-2015 award in one of the Hifi categories.
We were asked whether or not we would like to attend the awards ceremony on 6th September in Berlin. We said a big “yes”.
For being only 2 years “young”, winning such a prestigious mainstream award marks the pinnacle of iFi so far and given it was only a short hop over to Germany, it was an opportunity not to be missed.
This is just a brief report on our trip over as we would like to share the quite amazing experience we had with you all. Later on, we shall upload a video as it was an experience not to be missed and we want to give you a feel of the excitement we had.
Mixing it with Sony, Panasonic and Samsung
To catch a 7.05am flight, we were up at 3.30am and gingerly made our way to Heathrow. We were still tired but running on pure adrenalin when on Saturday, we went to the awards ceremony at the Kempinksi Bristol Hotel.
Once the reception was out of the way, there was a group photo. We were to one side near the Sony guys. As our Japanese is somewhat limited, we could only say a polite hello.
Once the group photograph session was out of the way, we had another round of drinks and met the Panasonic public relations team from Germany. We asked about the upcoming Lumix LX-8 (as we are avid LX-7 users)
The Panasonic team said some news should be forthcoming in the next few weeks. We just can’t wait as the LX-7 is our go to camera for show pictures and videos. And it absolutely excels with low light pictures.
After another round or two of drinks, we were all then ushered upstairs into the ballroom.
The whole path was lined by catering staff in evening dresses. We felt a bit nervous as champagne was free-flowing and we were staying teetotal (no one likes to trip up when going on stage at the Oscars!)
Below is the awards table flanked by only two of the gorgeous awards staff.
The ballroom was lit with real class and should come as no surprise as this is the crème de la crème. We sat next to the team from Samsung and we feel for them as they made the very long flight over and the jet lag was hitting them hard.
Then when the time came, our Mike Butler went on stage and went to receive the award from Paul Miller (Editor of HiFi News, the UK EISA member and HiFi expert for EISA).
Once the awards ceremony was over, we then went to the awards corner and took some more pictures. This is our Mike Butler with Werner Obst (WOD: iFi Germany).
In the desserts area, there was a live jazz band playing and there we met our friends from Avantgarde loudspeakers of Germany.
We also enjoyed chatting to Jorge Gonçalves (EISA President) and the new vice-president Ljubisa Miodragovic. Below is a picture of our Mike Butler and Vincent Luke with Jorge Gonçalves (EISA President).
We had managed to receive the award in front of the world’s largest electronics giants and we were quite relieved to have made it through with flying colours.
On Sunday, we flew back and despite a delayed flight, our spirit was not dampened as we were on cloud nine!
When we went through airport security, the solid block of metal that is the EISA award was easily identified by the airport security scanners and we were asked to unboxed the EISA award.
The airport security people said, “Ahhhhh, you won the EISA?” and we said yes grinning from ear to ear like a Cheshire cat. The enormity of the EISA award has started to sink in that the general public recognises the EISA. In all years we have been in audio, we never once received such a nice comment from those outside of channel audio. Super nice or what?
We took these nice pictures to celebrate.
We hope you enjoyed this blog as we have been absolutely blown away by the response to “Little Big iFi” from all the people at EISA and the attending representatives from the world’s electronics giants.
Now how can we go one better than the little nano iDSD?
