Contact Me

I welcome your messages, but I have a (more than!) full-time job and a growing family, and I simply can't answer emails as frequently and fully as I would like. For that reason, please assume the following:

While I will read every message I receive, please assume that I won't be able to reply. A reply could take up to four weeks.

Sorry to sound unwelcoming, but answering emails, especially those that require research or a degree of precision, takes an amazingly large amount of my time. Please help me keep on top of my emails by reading the following carefully before submitting your message:

  • If you send me a message, you agree to acknowledge any reply you receive from me. If I've taken an hour or two to research an answer to your question and type it all up in a form that is clear and explicit, then I think that I deserve a reply - even if it's just a quick "thanks". An amazing amount of my replies go unanswered - more than half, believe it or not - and from my point of view, that's simply rude. And deeply demoralising.
     
  • Please remember that the information on this site is provided totally free of charge, and is "as-is", with no help or support offered or implied. Any reply can only be on a "Reasonable Endeavours" basis, so please have realistic expectations of what I can offer you for free. If you are willing to pay a professional rate for my time, then please make that clear early on.
     
  • Please understand that by necessity, I prioritise my emails, meaning that rather than deal with them in the order they arrive, I deal with the easiest ones first. If you are asking something that requires a lot of effort, then please be especially patient, as I will think about it for a week or two before responding - I try to do that instead of simply dismissing it out of hand.
     
  • Please be reasonable when writing to me. Again, this is a free service, not a commercial offering, and no level of help and support is offered or implied - therefore you are much more likely to get results if you ask nicely. Seems obvious, I know, but messages seem to be getting increasingly demanding, entitled, and sometimes downright rude. I reserve the right to post examples of this sort of thing here!
     
  • If not already provided, please don't ask for parts lists or PCB layouts or schematics or source code. These would take considerable effort to make available, and there's no incentive for me because the projects have been built! If you're planning to copy one of my designs, do remember that generally speaking, this site does not contain "Cookbook" projects; my write-ups are intended for educational purposes, and perhaps to provide ideas and inspiration only - if you want to build something similar, expect to do your own research and engineering.
     
  • I'm not a hi-fi dealer, and so I can't answer queries about buying or selling hi-fi (I get a lot of those!). As a dedicated hoarder, I've never really sold any of my hi-fi components, so have no experience or wisdom to pass on. And I don't follow the second-hand markets, so have no idea what something might be worth.
     
  • I can't offer recommendations about what equipment to buy - especially loudspeakers, which can sound very different to others (and the acoustic environment has a large impact too). Audio is highly subjective, so my opinions should be worthless to you - my taste, my hearing, my music collection, and my listening room will likely be very different to yours. Frankly, this principle should be applied to all opinions that you find from any source, whether it's friends, reviewers, dealers or random people on the internet! You have to live with the system - listen and make your own mind up!
     
  • I get a lot of questions about random things, and in most cases, I can never fathom why someone thinks I will have expert knowledge about the item in question. The most recent example - the Marantz 2600. Never heard of it, and I've not mentioned it on this web site - indeed, I haven't written about anything at all made by Marantz here! But still, I did some research and read up on it, and took the time to offer some general advice. That took about an hour, and I've yet to get even an acknowledgement (please see the first bullet point above!). So if it's not explicitly mentioned on this web site, please help me out by explaining why you think I will know about it!
     
  • There is nothing for sale here! I often get emails asking for quotes for multimeters or similar. I assume that these are feeble attempts at scamming, rather than a misunderstanding, given that they mostly give generic (gmail or similar) email addresses.
     
  • I'm afraid that I only speak English. That doesn't include "Text-Speak"!
     

Yes, every one of these points is here because of messages received, and that this list continues to grow! At times I seriously consider removing the contact mechanism, or even taking down the whole site completely. Please remember that behind every word you see here is a human being with a full-time job and a family, and that I make no money whatsoever from the running of this web site, which is provided to you completely free of charge with no advertising.

By clicking the button below to proceed to the contact form, you confirm that you have read and understood every point above and agree that I can publish extracts from any message that violates any of those points, even if you haven't ticked the permission box on the contact form.